What Our Best-Ever PISA Result Doesn't Tell Us

Ireland had a good week, by the usual measure. The PISA 2025 results, published on 8 September, put our 15-year-olds first in the EU for reading, third for science and fourth for maths, out of 27 countries. The Minister was pleased, quite reasonably. ASTI, representing secondary teachers, welcomed the strong showing too, while flagging — fairly — that the longer trend in reading and maths is heading in the wrong direction and needs attention.

Then, for a couple of days, the letters pages did what letters pages do. One reader felt a newspaper headline on the falling scores was too gloomy given how well Ireland did overall. Another wrote back the next day to say falling standards are falling standards, whatever the ranking says. It was a genuine little argument about tone, and both writers made a fair point in their own way.

What struck me, reading all of it, was what wasn't there. Not one line, in the results, the ministerial reaction, or the letters that followed, about how any of this looked for a child with an SNA, a child on an autism spectrum, a child who didn't sit the test in the room everyone else sat it in, or didn't sit it at all because school had already become unmanageable for them that week. A national average is built out of the children who were there to be counted. It says nothing reliable about the ones who weren't, and not much more about the ones who were there in body but not in any way that the system had made comfortable.

This is the thing I keep coming back to with Irish education, in exam years and PISA years alike: we have got very good at measuring presence and calling it inclusion. A child turning up counts. A child sitting the test counts. A special class opening counts. All of that is real, and none of it is nothing. But none of it tells you whether the environment changed to meet the child, or whether the child was, once again, expected to do the changing.

I don't think this is anyone's fault in particular — not the teachers, who are asked to do more with the same hours and the same room; not the parents, worn down by September and the fight for a place that should never have needed fighting for; not the siblings, who absorb more of the household's stress than anyone asks them to; and certainly not the neurodivergent kids themselves, who are so often the last people blamed and the first people left out of the count. It's a system that was built, a long time ago, on a very narrow idea of the "normal" pupil, and has spent the decades since softening its edges without ever really redesigning itself around anyone else.

A good PISA result is worth having. I'd just like, one year, for the coverage that follows it to ask who the number left out — and for that question to feel as urgent as the ranking itself.

— Elaine