At the end of their compulsory schooling, do 15-year-olds in Germany have the ability to cope in today's living and working world? Only to a limited extent.
Berlin. German students are doing worse in the current PISA study than ever before. The results of the international education study are even worse than those from the year 2000, which triggered the âPisa shockâ in this country.
The study, which was published on Tuesday, states: âIn all three core domains examined, natural sciences, reading and mathematics, 15-year-old students in Germany achieved the lowest competency scores since the Pisa surveys began.â
There is a âclear downward trend,â said the head of the PISA study in Germany, Samuel Greiff. âThe loss of skills is not limited to certain performance areas or to individual groups of students, but can be observed across the entire performance spectrum.â
For the current study, around 6,700 students at around 250 schools in Germany were tested from March to May 2025. The sample is considered representative of 15-year-olds in Germany.
Specifically, the German young people achieved 486 points in natural sciences, 465 points in reading and 464 points in mathematics. Germany therefore only reaches the average level of the OECD countries.
The 236-page study states the following about the negative trend: âAlthough similar developments can also be seen in many other OECD and EU countries, the decline in skills tends to be greater in Germany.â
According to the research team, Pisa is not about testing what has been learned by heart. Rather, the study is intended to show how well young people are able to transfer their knowledge from various school subjects and their lives outside of school to new everyday problems.
The educational comparative study is coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and, in Germany, led by the Center for International Comparative Educational Studies (ZIB) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).
In order to get better again, the Pisa team recommends the following measures:
Identify support needs early and provide targeted support to small children. The plans of Federal Education Minister Karin Prien (CDU) also go in this direction: In the future, all children in Germany should be tested for language and development at the age of four according to uniform standards. Compulsory support should make starting primary school work better.
Accompanying studentsâ learning development based on data. âCountries like Canada show that learning development can be excellently monitored with regular, short tests,â explains TUM education researcher Greiff. Teachers could respond to this in a targeted pedagogical manner.
Strengthen schools according to their support needs. The federal government's Starting Opportunities program has been moving in this direction since 2024, which particularly supports schools with a high proportion of socially disadvantaged students.
âAs a society, we should not accept that young people leave school without the skills they need for the rest of their lives,â says study director Greiff. âThe results are cause for concern, but they are not fate.â
Education expert and teacher Alexander Brand, whose non-fiction book about the frontrunners in international education studies entitled âThe World Education Championsâ has just been published, calls for: diagnosing learning levels early and continuously, providing reliable individual and small group support and organizing further training as an integral part of the teaching profession.
What the German PISA team describes as particularly âstrikingâ is the growing proportion of young people who no longer achieve sufficient basic skills. This means they no longer have the basic skills they need to safely cope with the demands of training, work and everyday life.
Around a third of 15-year-olds lack these skills in reading and mathematics. The proportion of such students has doubled since 2015.
In the natural sciences, around a quarter of students have only limited competence. Around a fifth of young people do not have sufficient basic skills in any of the three areas.
There are also fewer particularly high-performing students. Example of mathematics: Here the proportion of young people with particularly high skills has fallen from 13 to eight percent since 2015. Only three percent of 15-year-olds reach the highest levels in all three areas.
The Pisa researchers consider the development in Germany to be âparticularly remarkableâ. After the âPisa shockâ 25 years ago, Germany was initially able to improve and maintain a good level.
New teaching methods have been introduced, numerous support programs have been launched, all-day schools have been expanded and teacher training has been changed. But then âfrugalityâ crept in, complains educational researcher Greiff. Performance has been steadily declining for around ten years.
Estonia and Austria well ahead of Germany
Students in the Chinese regions of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang achieve the best results in science and mathematics. 15-year-olds in Singapore have the highest skills in reading.
A total of 91 countries and around 760,000 students took part in the current PISA study. The educational researchers point out that it makes sense to compare Germany with comparable countries: Estonia, France, Canada, the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland.
The abilities of young people in Germany depend particularly heavily on the socio-economic situation of their families. This includes parental education, professional status and resources in the household.
The socioeconomic situation is the most important factor compared to gender and immigration background. Take natural sciences, for example: Only two percent of students from disadvantaged families acquire high skills, while for privileged families the figure is 25 percent.
The Pisa study describes that 29 percent of students in Germany have an immigrant background. The researchers' conclusion: educational inequalities cannot be attributed to immigration background alone.
