Icelandic education system failing students, lecturer says

Iceland’s education system is failing to deliver results in key subjects, Haukur Arason, an associate professor at the University of Iceland’s School of Education, told mbl.is.

Arason made the comments during the Dagmál programme earlier this week, where he and Sigríður Ólafsdóttir, an associate professor at the university’s School of Education and a literacy specialist, discussed the latest PISA results.

Iceland has experienced the largest decline of any country since 2015 in student performance in science, reading comprehension and mathematics. The country is now performing well below the Nordic and Western European countries it seeks to compare itself with, Arason said.

He said there were numerous reasons for the decline, but argued that Iceland needed a clearer strategy and had to face the facts about the weak performance of its students.

Student performance has declined internationally overall, Arason said, but the drop has been greater in Iceland. The country had always lagged somewhat behind others in science, he said, but performance had deteriorated significantly since 2015.

Iceland now ranks 25th out of 26 European OECD countries for science proficiency.