How to improve schools, according to the OECD, while the system is dragging them down

«PISA in Focus» No. 132, “How to Improve Schools”

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Antoni Hernández-Fernández

The report «PISA in Focus» n.º 132 «Cómo mejorar los centros educativos» (“PISA in Focus» No. 132, “How to Improve Schools”), devoted to the good practices of schools participating in PISA for Schools, has appeared almost simultaneously with the OECD’s publication of Spain’s worst-ever results in PISA 2025. The gap between the managerial optimism of this report and the actual diagnosis of the Spanish education system—compounded, in the Catalan case, by sheer administrative incompetence—could hardly be more evident.

PISA and the competitive obsession with rankings can certainly be criticised. But at least it is a unified attempt to assess education systems on a global scale. I would suggest that its more vocal critics propose alternatives. The OECD, however, has a remarkable sense of timing. While it was circulating “PISA in Focus» No. 132 on how to improve schools, a catalogue of good practices from schools that “translate data into change”, dated February 2026, the OECD’s own general PISA 2025 report, published in September, was confirming that Spain had achieved its worst-ever results in science, reading and mathematics, with all three domains declining simultaneously for the first time since Spain began taking part in the tests. Other countries, admittedly, have also experienced this decline. But surely the OECD had already given us its catalogue of solutions!

Given the disaster, it must be acknowledged that the OECD has at least put forward what it presents as proposals for improvement. Few analysts are prepared to do so. Its PISA in Focus No. 132 presents some appealing figures: 85% of schools participating in PISA for Schools reported that the assessment acts as a catalyst for curricular and pedagogical improvements; 40% have successfully implemented well-being and equity programmes; and 30% actively cooperate with other schools through networks. Smoke, propaganda, or genuinely innovative experiences that could be replicated? The OECD’s triumphalist account of its “ten success stories” is a textbook case of cherry-picking which, much to the OECD’s chagrin, sits alongside a broad, systemic failure. But let us examine some broader elements that cannot be attributed solely to the case of Spain (Table I).

Table I: : Pillars for improving schools according to the PISA in Focus report, and general critical counterpoint.

Read closely, PISA in Focus 132 is not a neutral guide to ‘good practices’ but a catalogue of recipes that the OECD itself has been promoting for years: less disciplinary curriculum, more projects; less content, more transversal skills; less academic rigour, more emotional well-being and participatory governance. Table I sets out the improvement pillars it proposes, its perspective, and my own critical review (with my biases and noise, as Kahneman would put it, of course). The problem is not that the alternatives proposed by the OECD are inherently bad—teacher training, improved infrastructure and collaboration between schools, and attention to pupils’ well-being are all fundamental—but that the report invariably presents them in generic terms, as vague generalities wrapped in smoke, as a magical response to a decline which, in countries such as Spain, has coincided chronologically with the introduction of curricula increasingly less focused on content and increasingly oriented towards diffuse competencies.

Ultimately, the OECD diagnoses the educational problem through its own test and then prescribes the cure. Yet the solutions it proposes reinforce the very causes that much of the teaching profession has been identifying for years as part of the problem. A report that presented as a “success story” a school that had restored mathematics teaching hours or strengthened the systematic reading of demanding texts would have, at the very least, as much claim to a place among the selected “good practices” as the school it cites for replacing teacher-led instruction with project work. The absence of any such example is no coincidence: it shows which way the official pedagogical wind is blowing—and that the ideology behind it no longer holds water. Particularly in the wake of the latest PISA results. But let us not get carried away: there are no universal success stories that can simply be applied to every context. If there were, and they were not implemented, then, as with miracle cures in hospitals, it would prove the wickedness of our political leaders.

When Andreu Navarra and David Rabadà edited La educación cancelada (Sloper, 2022), various voices from the teaching profession described how the transmission of knowledge had been devalued in Spanish classrooms. In my own case, I argued for the sidelining of technology, in a pre-AI-boom context (in a text written in 2021, before the commercial success of ChatGPT…), paradoxically in a world that increasingly needs better technological education. The institutional response, and that of certain education lobbies, was predictable: unnecessary alarmism, reactionary nostalgia, catastrophism, rojipardismo (the convergence of far-left and far-right positions) and other delights I shall spare you here. Successive legal reforms (from LOGSE to LOMLOE) have further undermined the standing of disciplinary content, imposing methodologies such as project-based learning across the board. While such approaches are key in some subjects and do not preclude the teaching of theoretical content—as in technology or technical disciplines in vocational education and training—they have no evidence of improving learning universally across all subjects and are, in fact, counterproductive in many cases. Humanistic, scientific and technical knowledge has likewise been diluted in favour of diffuse competency-based education, defended as inevitable and modernising, with subjects merged and teaching time reduced for fundamental disciplines, while a succession of strange, filler or fashionable optional subjects has been introduced at will. Some may perhaps have been well-intentioned, but their lasting contribution to students’ learning and cultural background tends towards zero.

Years later, the PISA 2025 data leave little room for debate: education is being cancelled. Spain has now endured a decade of sustained decline, one that cannot be attributed to any particular generation or school year. Nor can screens be blamed, if we look at the data from countries that are even more ‘screen-saturated’. I would like those who once dismissed this as catastrophism to explain why the diagnosis turned out to be right—or whether they still regard it as mere coincidence. Read with a critical distance, but now in the light of the PISA 2025 data, PISA in Focus 132 confirms—perhaps unwittingly, you’ll notice—our warnings. The OECD acknowledges that “data alone are not enough” and that many schools “had difficulties translating PISA results into concrete actions without additional support”. In other words, the diagnosis had been apparent for years. Now the data provide further confirmation: investment is necessary, but it must be accompanied by systemic intervention. There is no upward trend. What has been lacking, as the OECD itself acknowledges in its customary technical euphemism, is the political will to tackle the underlying problems. But please, no more biased reports on good practices, no more public money spent funding the usual suspects, only for them to tell us now that the emperor has no clothes.

Epilogue: Catalonia, when there is not even a diagnosis

Allow me a final irony in this brief epilogue, as a Catalan teacher. While the rest of Europe can at least measure its decline, in Catalonia we cannot even do that: the Departament d’Educació granted exemptions to more than 23% of the selected pupils (well above the 5% tolerated by the OECD), thereby invalidating the Catalan sample for PISA 2025. Out of sight, out of mind. Catalonia has been left out of the international report and will not have comparable data until 2029. Francesc Pedró, professor at Pompeu Fabra University, who, incidentally, worked at UNESCO and spent a decade at the OECD, described it bluntly as “unheard of”. So while there is debate about how to reverse PISA’s worst-ever result, in Catalonia we cannot even discuss whether we have improved or worsened. As we say in Catalan, cagada pastoret. The Departament has blown up any possibility of analysis, although, let us speculate, would Catalonia have been the exception to the rule, would it have been around the OECD averages, or would it perhaps have led the PISA collapse?

References:

• OCDE (2026). PISA in Focus 132. Cómo mejorar los centros educativos. Conclusiones extraídas de los casos de buenas prácticas de PISA para Centros Educativos. (OECD (2026). PISA in Focus 132. How to Improve Schools. Conclusions drawn from the good-practice cases from PISA for Schools). educativos_187161/https://www.libreria.educacion.gob.es/libro/pisa-in-focus-132-como-mejorar-los-centros-educativos-conclusiones-extraidas-de-los-casos-de-buenas-practicas-de-pisa-para-centros-educativos_187161/

Source: educational EVIDENCE

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