Iceland withholds school-level PISA results, MP says

School-level results from the PISA assessment should be shared with schools and municipalities, according to Jón Pétur Zimsen, an Independence Party MP and first deputy chair of parliament’s General and Education Affairs Committee, mbl.is reports.

Schools and municipalities in Iceland have not received their own results, even though the data exists and is used by other countries. Jón Pétur said the results could provide schools with feedback on their work.

“Why are the PISA results not sent to schools?” Jón Pétur asked in an interview about the assessment results presented last week.

Icelandic students’ performance declined more between 2015 and 2025 than that of students in any other country or region included in the OECD’s PISA summary. When developments in reading comprehension, mathematics and science are combined, Iceland ranks last in the comparison.

The PISA assessment was conducted in spring 2025. Nearly 4,000 students in Iceland took part, representing about 78 percent of all 15-year-olds. That proportion is high by international standards, as only a few percent of 15-year-olds take the assessment in many other countries.

Jón Pétur said that schools in Lithuania and Latvia receive their own results, even when only a few students from each school are included in the sample. Municipalities in Estonia also receive information about their own position, he said.

He said he had discussed the issue with the OECD and that officials there did not understand why the information was not being used more effectively in Iceland.

Jón Pétur stressed that individual school results provide only an indication of a school’s performance and that their statistical reliability can vary. Nevertheless, he said, they could offer schools important feedback.

“But we choose not to use this. Municipalities do not even get to know where they stand,” he said.

The Centre for Education and School Services, formerly the Directorate of Education, has not informed schools about their performance in the two most recent PISA assessments, conducted in 2018 and 2022.