PISA 2025: Philippines breaks out of bottom 10, sees best lift in reading

MANILA, Philippines (Seventh update: 10:19 p.m.) — The Philippines has posted its highest PISA scores since joining the test in 2018 and izmproved faster in reading than any other country with comparable data, according to the results released Tuesday, September 8.

However, nearly two in three Filipino students still fall short of having the minimum proficiency in science, mathematics and reading, according to the 2025 PISA results. 

Filipino students improved by an average of 16 to 20 points across all three subjects of science, reading and mathematics, enough to lift the country off the bottom rungs it has occupied since 2018. 

The Philippines notched a mean score of 373 in science (up 17 points from 2022), 371 in mathematics (up 16 points), and 367 in reading (up 20 points).

The gains in reading alone are worth roughly a year of schooling by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) own rule of thumb, which treats 20 points as one year's worth of learning. 

PISA is historically administered every three years and selects test-takers through random sampling. The test targets fifteen-year-olds as this is the age that marks the end of compulsory schooling in several territories.  

Some 8,000 students from at least 208 schools in the Philippines, 140 of which are public schools, participated in the 2025 PISA. 

Escaping stagnation 

The Philippines' showing in the 2025 PISA has allowed it to buck its own flatline trend since its last two participations in the global assessment.  

In 2018, the Philippines ranked last of 79 education systems in reading and second-lowest in mathematics and science. In 2022, it placed sixth-lowest in mathematics and reading and third-lowest in science among 81 countries.

For this year, the Philippines ranks 77th out of 91 systems in science, 74th in mathematics and 72nd in reading, based on a Department of Education (DepEd) presentation of the results the same day.

The number of participating countries and territories has also climbed, from 79 in 2018 to 91 in 2025, which widened the pool of countries a nation can outrank.

Well below the OECD average

The Philippines’ relative leap in its scores comes against a backdrop of a global slump, as the OECD average has dropped by 15 points in reading, nine in math, and three in science. 

The OECD average is the mean score across the organization's 38 member countries, most of them high-income economies including the United States, Japan, South Korea and much of Europe. The OECD designed and runs PISA.

Average scores across OECD member nations stood at 482 in science, 463 in mathematics, and 461 in reading, leaving Filipino students trailing by 92 to 109 points.

This is a gap equivalent to four to five years of formal schooling, by OECD standards.

Nearly two in three lack basic proficiency

PISA measures students' performance through six proficiency levels. The OECD treats Level 2 as the baseline, or the point at which a student can "participate meaningfully in society."

For instance, in science, this means students who score at or above Level 2 can "use science as a tool for reasoning: explaining, interpreting, evaluating and making decisions in familiar real-world situations," the OECD wrote in the PISA 2025 report.

"The baseline is therefore meaningful because it represents a threshold of functional science literacy," it added.

A student at Level 2 in reading can identify the main idea in a text of moderate length. In mathematics, they can recognize how a simple situation can be represented mathematically.

Only about 36% of Filipino students reached Level 2 — the minimum proficiency PISA measures — in science, mathematics and reading in 2025, according to the results. That leaves nearly two in three below the baseline level in all three subjects.

This is already an improvement from the 2022 results, when only 16% to 24% reached minimum proficiency in the three subjects.

Meanwhile, highly proficient learners remain a tiny minority in the Philippines, based on the 2025 results, where only 0.3% of test-takers reached Levels 5 or 6 in any subject, the assessment’s highest performance bands.

Biggest leap in reading

The Philippines recorded the steepest ten-year improvement trend in reading of any education system with comparable data, according to the PISA 2025 report. 

The OECD measures long-term progress as an average change per decade. They do this, as explained in the report, by calculating the linear regression across all the cycles a country has taken.

In reading comprehension, the Philippines gained 38 points, ahead of Cambodia at 36 and Türkiye at 34. Qatar recorded 18 points and Taiwan (referred to as "Chinese Taipei" in the report) recorded 14.

When the Philippines first joined the PISA cycle in 2018, it ranked at the very bottom of all 79 participating countries at the time with an average reading score of 340. 

The Philippines has taken the test three times over seven years, improving 27 points in reading between 2018 and 2025. That works out to about 3.9 points a year, which the OECD scales to roughly 38 points over a decade.

The data shows the Philippines is also bucking an overall global decline in reading skills. According to the OECD, of 74 education systems with comparable data, three-quarters recorded significant declines. Only five, including the Philippines, showed improvements.

Two poor showings led to 'galvanized' effort in PISA 2025

Much of the 2018 and 2022 PISA results had checked out with the government's own data at the time showing low student proficiency and a learning crisis across core areas.

DepEd itself under then-Secretary Sara Duterte conceded, based on the 2022 PISA results, that the average 15-year-old Filipino student is academically five to six years behind their peers in OECD countries. 

The department had vowed to ramp up its preparations for the next PISA and had even formed a "PISA 2025 Task Force," among others.

Education Secretary Sonny Angara credited a mix of curriculum changes, remediation programs and even the provision of computers to students when he presented the results Tuesday.

The department was "galvanized to really do everything possible to help our students" and turn its attention to reading, writing and arithmetic, Angara said.

Angara said DepEd had studied the 2018 and 2022 PISA reports for practical fixes. One finding was that some students had never used a computer before the exam itself, which is computer-based.

The department surveyed schools to check that each had at least one computer, Angara said.

"We were surprised because we thought private schools already had computers," Angara said. "Even some private schools didn't have computers either."