Canadian students remain among the world's stronger performers. Their latest results should still trouble parents and policymakers.
The 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tested 15-year-olds in science, reading and mathematics, and recently published their results. While scores fell across much of the world, Canada experienced an especially sharp long-term decline. Since 2015, our average science score has fallen 23 points. Reading is down 29 points since 2018, while mathematics dropped another 12 points since 2022. Roughly 20 PISA points represent one year of learning.
The scores tell us what we already know. Ontario educators report persistent absenteeism, disruptive behaviour and violence, while results tracked by the province's education quality and accountability office (EQAO) have raised further concerns about basic skills. Meanwhile, in rapidly growing Alberta, overcrowded classrooms are contributing to the challenge.
Provincial governments have responded to some of these challenges. Ontario introduced new attendance requirements and created an expert panel to address weak mathematics results. Alberta is adding schools and modular classrooms. While these measures may ease immediate pressures, lasting improvement will require deeper changes.
Many of the challenges are predictable, but difficult to address. Pandemic disruptions continue to affect attendance and learning habits. Digital devices occupy a growing place in classrooms, even as evidence connects heavy screen use with weaker academic performance. Newcomer students arrive with varied educational experiences, and schools need adequate language-learning resources and other supports to help them integrate, adjust and succeed. Enrolment growth without matching resources strains teachers and classmates alike.
Canada's results should also renew debate about classroom instruction. Canadian schools have spent years moving toward inquiry-led and learner-centred approaches. Inquiry has a place after students possess enough knowledge to ask worthwhile questions but is a weak substitute for carefully sequenced instruction. Explicit teaching, strong subject knowledge and regular assessment give students the foundation needed to benefit from inquiry-led learning.
Still, many of these challenges have already been identified and they risk becoming entrenched. Attendance scores and device bans aren't going to reverse the trend alone. This is why we have argued that Canada, as a whole, should examine the structure of its education systems.
Alberta again ranks among the country's top performers. That province also gives families broad access to public, separate, charter, francophone, alternative and independent schools. This variety allows education to be shaped around a child's needs, community and convictions.
Research gives reason to take that fit seriously. Our previous reports have found that students attending schools aligned with their family's religion performed five to nine percentile points higher than unmatched students after researchers controlled for family income, structure, parental education and other factors. The Cardus Education Survey has also found distinctive academic, relational, civic and personal-formation outcomes among graduates of independent schools.
Parents have noticed. Independent-school enrolment has grown more quickly than public-school enrolment in much of Canada, and the number of new independent schools is keeping pace. Families are accepting tuition bills and making considerable sacrifices because they want an education that suits their children. Their choices telegraph information that Ministers of Education should heed.
Many countries publicly fund several kinds of schools while maintaining common standards and public accountability, and all provinces but Ontario and the Maritime provinces operate this way. Expanding educational pluralism would give access to educational opportunity to many more families who otherwise couldn't afford it. Independent schools have greater scope to contribute ideas, absorb enrolment growth and develop responses to lost learning. Smaller institutions can often change curricula, schedules or teaching practices more quickly than large public systems governed through several bureaucratic layers.
School prepares a young person for adult life. Academic knowledge matters alongside character, belonging, sound judgment and the capacity to serve others. A pluralist system can pursue these purposes through schools with different educational philosophies, provided each meets clear public standards.
Canada's PISA decline should prompt provinces to look beyond isolated policy adjustments and draw on the full range of schools already educating Canadian children. Giving families greater freedom to find an education suited to their child, while inviting independent schools to contribute their experience and ideas, would help build a more responsive system in which students can recover lost learning and prepare for the responsibilities of adult life.
