Immigrants Outperform Native-Born British Students

Students from migrant families in the United Kingdom are outperforming their peers without a migrant background, according to the latest PISA results, putting Britain among a small group of European countries where students with an immigrant background achieve better results.

First- and second-generation migrant students in the UK scored an average 1.2 points higher in the OECD’s mathematics, science and reading assessments.

Although the difference remains small, the significant finding is that migrant-background students no longer trail students with at least one parent born in the UK.

The UK joins Cyprus, Montenegro and Malta among the European countries where students from migrant backgrounds outperform other students. The result contrasts sharply with the OECD average, where students with a migrant background score around 40 points lower in science.

Britain bucks wider European trend

The contrast becomes particularly striking in Germany, where the education gap has widened to around 80 points.

France also continues to record results below the OECD average, while in the UK the gap had almost disappeared by 2025, compared with around 20 points a decade earlier.

The British result has attracted attention from education and migration researchers, although experts say no single factor can fully explain it.

Lucinda Platt, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, describes the British performance as a “success story” that has developed over several years.

Nuni Jorgensen, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, similarly says several possible explanations exist, but none provides a complete answer.

Education reforms may have played a role

One possible explanation involves the education reforms introduced by the previous Conservative government.

Schools in England placed greater emphasis on acquiring specific knowledge and less on broader definitions of skills.

However, migrant-background students also perform strongly in Scotland, where those reforms did not apply and where overall PISA results have deteriorated. This suggests that the reforms alone cannot explain the British pattern.

Another factor could be the relatively high educational attainment of many migrants who move to Britain.

According to the 2021 census, 44% of adult residents born overseas hold a higher education qualification, compared with 31% of those born in Britain.

That educational background may translate into higher expectations and greater academic support for children within migrant families.

The London effect

Researchers have also examined the so-called “London effect”.

The British capital has both a large migrant population and some of the country’s strongest schools. However, it remains unclear whether high-performing schools help migrant students achieve better results or whether families with strong educational ambitions contribute to improving the schools themselves.

The structure of the education system may also play a role.

Countries such as Germany, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands direct students towards different academic or vocational pathways at relatively young ages.

Students from migrant backgrounds are more likely to enter vocational tracks, potentially reinforcing educational inequalities before they reach the age of 15.

Language alone cannot explain the gap

Language provides only part of the explanation.

Second-generation migrant students account for the strongest part of Britain’s performance, while first-generation students continue to lag behind students born in the UK.

Even so, children who speak another language at home appear capable of closing the initial gap in English relatively quickly.

Spain provides a contrasting example, showing that sharing a language does not guarantee educational convergence.

Despite the large-scale arrival of families from Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, migrant-background students in Spain score an average of around 40 points lower across the three main PISA assessments.

That difference corresponds to approximately two school years.

The proportion of 15-year-old first- or second-generation migrant students in Spain rose from around 11% in 2015 to 20.3% in 2025, an increase of 85% over the decade.

At the same time, 49% of Spanish school principals report teacher shortages, while 72% report a shortage of support staff.

Education gap is not inevitable

The findings suggest that neither migration nor language alone determines educational performance.

Researchers instead point to factors including families’ educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, parental expectations, school resources and the ability of education systems to address early inequalities.

The British example suggests that the education gap between migrant and native-born students is not inevitable, even though the precise reasons behind Britain’s unusual performance remain complex.

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