Pisa chief urges Danish parents to show greater interest in school

Denmark’s 15-year-olds have recorded their weakest-ever Pisa results in reading, mathematics and science, according to DR. Andreas Schleicher, the OECD director for education and skills who launched the international assessments, says smartphones and artificial intelligence are part of the problem, but that parents also have an important role to play.

The newly published results have prompted a crisis meeting at the Ministry of Education, a press conference with the prime minister and an emergency meeting of Local Government Denmark.

Reading skills have declined particularly sharply since the previous Pisa assessment in 2022. The same trend has been recorded in 43 of the 90 countries taking part in the assessment.

Schleicher said the results were concerning because reading is the foundation for all other skills. Students are reading faster, he said, but more superficially and less accurately, while showing less curiosity and engagement.

Students have also become less capable of comparing different pieces of information, reflecting on them and dealing with complex situations, he said. At the same time, fewer students read for pleasure, with reading increasingly becoming a way to obtain information that can instead be reduced to an easily digestible format by tools such as ChatGPT.

Many students also report being unable to concentrate in class because of their own smartphones or those used by others, Schleicher said. He warned that these factors weaken the skills that form the foundation for everything else.

But he said Denmark’s declining results also reflected a more fundamental change: weaker ambitions in the education system. Students can receive good grades despite performing poorly, he said, while difficulties are sometimes made easier for them instead of prompting a greater effort to help them improve.

It was concerning if young people came to believe that the system did not trust them to do well and that mediocre performance was acceptable, Schleicher said.

He also pointed to declining parental interest in children’s school lives. In the Pisa assessment, many European students said their parents were less interested in what they did at school and how well they performed.

Parental interest in the school day has a greater effect on learning outcomes than family income, Schleicher said. Children need to feel that their schoolwork matters to their parents, but that feeling has clearly weakened in Denmark since the 2022 assessment.

His message to Danish parents is simple but important: they do not need to spend three hours a day doing homework with their children or make school easier for them. Instead, they should show genuine interest in their children’s questions, offer support and trust the authority of schools and teachers.