Parliamentary question

Written question to the European Commission

The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a series of tests in reading, mathematics and science, which monitor performance of 15-year-olds every three years. Based on PISA results, the effectiveness of a country’s education system is measured.

Within the EU, PISA results are particularly important, because they feed into the ‘Education and Training 2020’ (ET2020) strategic cooperation framework. While, in principle, every 15-year-old can be selected to sit the PISA test, countries are allowed to exclude up to 5 % of the eligible population according to certain criteria. Consequently, the percentage of students with disabilities remains extremely low. This goes against Article 24 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which requires the provision of an inclusive education system at all levels.

1. Did the Commission take into account the under-representation of students with disabilities in PISA, which resulted in misleading information about the reality of each country’s education system being used when determining the ET2020 benchmarks, and does it intend to take this into account when evaluating whether the benchmarks have been achieved?

2. Will the Commission engage with the OECD to make the PISA test more inclusive, and a tool for measuring progress towards CRPD implementation at EU level?

Answer given by Commissioner Gabriel on behalf of the European Commission

The Commission uses the Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development’s (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as one of several sources when looking at the strengths and weaknesses of education systems in the EU Member States and determining benchmarks.

The PISA assessment is generally considered to be a reliable source of comparable data on educational attainment across many countries around the world. However, results from international educational assessments like PISA should always be interpreted with caution, as their measurements do not capture everything.

One omission in PISA is indeed that some students are excluded from the test for various reasons, for example because of disabilities. So the exclusion of students from PISA might vary slightly between countries, but does not significantly impact the overall results.

Both the OECD and the Commission consider the inclusion of all students in the education system to be of great importance. To meet this end, the longer-term strategy for PISA aims at making the assessment more inclusive by widening the access of PISA for students with disabilities and other special education needs.

This will provide data on a wider group of students in the future and thus even more accurate information on the performance of education systems in EU Member States.