Just before Christmas the school circulated the report of the PISA test that was done in all European schools during the 21/22 academic year. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been carried out by the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills across the globe at regular intervals for more than 20 years. Basically, by measuring the performance of students at age 15 in reading, maths and science, and simultaneously gathering a large amount of background data, the PISA methodology seeks to evaluate and compare the quality, equity and efficiency of school systems world-wide. The Governing Board of the European Schools was keen to find out how our system compares to the European and international averages.

The overall results are brilliant and very encouraging. Two reports are available:

• The group report for all European schools is published here: Ver informe
• The special report for the European School of Alicante was circulated as a pdf-attachment to the email of 21 December 2022 in DE, EN and FR, along with a reader guide in EN and ES. Here are the documents: ENGLISH – SPANISH – FRENCH – GERMAN

The reports are massive, 113 and 95 pages respectively. Not many of us will have time or the burning desire to really penetrate them in depth. However, they are nicely edited and quite user friendly. We strongly recommend you to at least take a look at the main overview pages, where you can see that our school is way above both European and international averages. The biggest positive gap is in maths and the smallest in reading. The very special linguistic situation in our schools gives a new meaning to the concept of mother tongue/first language and surprisingly, the SWALS students who were tested in their section language, had the best overall results. But that is only one out of very many interesting details.

The question is where there is room for improvement and what conclusions can be drawn from the wealth of information provided by these reports. In the e-mail of 21 December, the school announces a meeting to present lessons learned and possible future action. We are very much looking forward to this. To be continued…