Sweden’s PISA results prompt calls for national school emergency
Tuesday 8th September 2026 on 12:30 in
Sweden
Sweden’s record-low result in the latest PISA assessment has triggered a political dispute over the state of the country’s schools, Swedish public broadcaster SVT reported. Social Democratic leader Magdalena Andersson called the result a “national emergency”, while Education and Integration Minister Simona Mohamsson blamed increased screen use and reduced reading.
Like other Nordic countries, Sweden fell sharply in the latest PISA assessment. The biggest decline was in reading comprehension, where Swedish 15-year-olds lost knowledge equivalent to an entire school year.
“The PISA result shows that there is a national emergency for Swedish schools. We must let this be a wake-up call,” Andersson said at a press conference.
She placed much of the blame on the government’s education policy and the extraction of profits from schools.
“They have betrayed Swedish schools and Swedish pupils. There have been cutbacks instead of investments. Now we can see the result in black and white,” Andersson said.
Mohamsson said the decline was linked to increased screen time and less reading for pleasure. She cited OECD education chief Andreas Schelicher, who said that increased reading on screens and reduced recreational reading could partly explain the reading comprehension result.
“The effects of increased screen time and reduced reading have now hit with full force,” Mohamsson said.
She warned that Sweden could end up with “a generation of functional illiterates” unless screens are phased out of schools. Asked what the government could have done to prevent the decline, she said the result reflected an international trend, with most countries losing ground.
Sweden Democrats leader Jimmie Åkesson offered a different explanation. In a post on X, he blamed “mass immigration”, arguing that neither screens nor school ownership was the main cause of the poor results.
Åkesson said many young people in parts of the country spoke “poor suburban Swedish”, had limited vocabularies and struggled to speak or read Swedish.