PISA 2025: Malta's Results Under the Microscope
What the OECD's latest international assessment reveals about Maltese 15-year-olds — and how the country compares.
On 8 September 2026, the OECD published the results of PISA 2025 — the Programme for International Student Assessment — its largest cycle yet, covering roughly 760,000 15-year-olds across 91 countries and economies. The global headline was stark: reading and mathematics scores fell to the lowest averages ever recorded. Malta's own results, released alongside the international report, show the country following that downward trend, and in some areas falling faster than the OECD as a whole.
The headline numbers
A total of 3,680 students from 46 Maltese schools sat the assessment, representing around 95% of the country's 15-year-old population. Compared with the last cycle in 2022, every subject area declined:
- Reading: down 30 points, from 445 to 415 — the sharpest fall of the three subjects
- Mathematics: down 27 points, from 466 to 439
- Science: down 13 points, from 466 to 453
Figure 1: Malta's average PISA scores, 2022 vs 2025.
How Malta compares to the OECD average
All three of Malta's 2025 scores landed below the corresponding OECD averages (461 in reading, 463 in mathematics, and 482 in science). The gap was widest in science, where Malta trailed the OECD average by close to 30 points.
Figure 2: Malta's 2025 scores set against the OECD average.
Beyond the averages, the distribution of results is also a concern: Malta recorded a lower-than-average share of high-performing students and a higher-than-average share of low performers — meaning the decline is not evenly spread, but weighted toward students already struggling.
AI in the classroom: a national outlier
One of the more striking Malta-specific findings concerns artificial intelligence. The OECD survey found that 91% of Maltese students reported having used AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini — a notably high figure. Maltese students said they turned to these tools more often than the OECD average for tasks including general learning, preliminary research, summarising texts, and drafting written assignments.
The report does not draw a direct causal line between AI use and falling scores, but the timing puts Malta in an interesting position: a small, highly digitally-connected country where AI adoption among teenagers appears to be running ahead of the international curve, at the same moment as academic performance is sliding.
What might be driving the decline
The OECD report and subsequent commentary point to several overlapping factors behind the global slide, all of which are relevant to Malta's own context:
- A continued post-pandemic disruption to learning that some education systems have not fully recovered from
- A widely reported global teacher shortage, affecting continuity and quality of instruction
- Shifting student attention spans and study habits linked to heavier device and social media use
- Rapid, largely unstructured adoption of AI tools for schoolwork, ahead of clear school policy or guidance
What comes next
PISA 2025 is being released in stages. The results discussed here form part of Volume I, focused on core subject performance. Two further OECD reports are expected — one on English as a foreign language in April 2027, and one on learning in the digital world in May 2027 — both of which are likely to shed more light on how Malta's students are engaging with technology and language learning specifically.
For now, the 2025 results give Malta's education stakeholders a clear, if uncomfortable, benchmark: scores below the OECD average across the board, a widening gap at the lower end of the performance scale, and a student population already deeply embedded in AI-assisted learning. How the education system responds over the next three years will likely shape where Malta stands at the next PISA cycle.
Source: OECD, PISA 2025 Results (Volume I): Future-Ready Students; national reporting from the Malta News Agency / Italpress, September 2026.
Contact us