Does "below Level 2" mean these teenagers cannot do arithmetic?

No. They do not reach the threshold at which the OECD speaks of functional everyday competence — converting prices, for instance, without anyone setting out the method.

Are Canary schools worse than others?

PISA does not measure that. The survey estimates the result of a system from a sample. The strongest association in the Canary data is the social index of families.

How much is a 15-point difference?

By the OECD's rule of thumb about 20 points correspond to one school year, so 15 points would be about three quarters of that. The OECD warns against taking it literally: depending on the country the value lies between 7 and 26.5 points.

Are there results for individual islands?

No. PISA 2025 reports figures for the autonomous community, not separately for Tenerife, Gran Canaria or the smaller islands.

Where can I read the raw data?

In the OECD's international report at oecd.org/pisa and in the Spanish analysis by the INEE, each with a technical annex on the sample.

CANARY ISLANDS · EDUCATION

39.3 per cent below the basic level: why the Canaries lag in mathematics

The OECD published the results of PISA 2025 on 8 September 2026. For the Canary Islands they show a mathematics score of 442 points — but a different figure matters more: 39.3 per cent of the 15-year-olds tested do not reach proficiency Level 2, which the OECD describes as the minimum for everyday life. Roughly four in ten. The explanations sit partly in the data themselves — and they begin a long way outside the classroom.

10 September 2026 · By Lucía Medina Reyes · 6 min

Photo: AKA MBG, CC0 (illustrative image).

The figures and their sources

OECD, PISA 2025 (8 September 2026): Canary Islands 442 points in mathematics, 445 in reading, 469 in science.
OECD, PISA 2025: Spain 457 / 451 / 477; OECD average 463 / 461 / 482.
Canary breakdown of PISA 2025, 8 September 2026: below Level 2 are 39.3 per cent in mathematics, 33.7 per cent in reading, 26.6 per cent in science.
Analysis by La Provincia, 9 September 2026: 21.1 per cent are below Level 2 in all three domains at once, and only 2 to 3 per cent reach the top levels in all three.
PISA social index ISEC, quoted by EFE on 8 September 2026: Canary Islands −0.24, Spain −0.06, Madrid +0.32.
Ministry of Education, EPA data for 2025: early school leaving in the Canaries 15.9 per cent, in Spain 12.8 per cent.

What Level 2 means

PISA sorts results not only by points but by proficiency levels. The OECD treats Level 2 as the baseline: a pupil who reaches it can put a simple everyday situation into mathematical terms unprompted — comparing two routes, converting prices into another currency. A pupil below it struggles with exactly those tasks. In the Canaries that applies to 39.3 per cent; the Spanish figure, according to the tables quoted, is around one third and the OECD average around 35 per cent. The gap is real, but it is not a Canary anomaly — the whole field has moved downwards.

What PISA measures — and what it does not

PISA tests a sample of 15-year-olds, not whole year groups and not individual schools. In the Canaries, according to regional education department figures quoted by El Día on 9 September 2026, 1,645 pupils from 50 centres took part; across Spain around 30,000 from 956 centres. No league table of individual schools can be derived from it.

For converting points, the OECD works with roughly 20 points per school year, according to an explainer in El País of 9 September 2026 — while warning against taking that literally, because the value ranges from 7 to 26.5 points depending on the country. The 15 points between the Canaries and the Spanish average would on that basis be about three quarters of a school year.

The first cause sits inside the dataset

PISA records a socio-economic and cultural index for every pupil, the ISEC: parents' occupation and educational attainment, resources in the household. The Canaries come to −0.24 according to EFE (8 September 2026), Spain to −0.06 and Madrid to +0.32; only Murcia, Andalusia, Ceuta and Melilla are lower.

How strongly that bears on results is shown by the analysis La Provincia published on 9 September 2026: between the quarter of pupils with the highest ISEC and the quarter with the lowest there is a gap of 54 to 59 points within the Canaries — close to three school years. Family background creates a wider gap inside the archipelago than the archipelago has to the national average.

Repeating a year, and leaving early

The second explanation is grade repetition. According to the same analysis, pupils who have repeated a year are 8.67 times more likely to belong to the group with consistently low results. That establishes no direction of cause — repetition can itself follow earlier difficulties — but it shows how strongly problems concentrate there.

Then there is early school leaving: for 2025 the Ministry of Education, using EPA data, puts the Canaries at 15.9 per cent against 12.8 per cent for Spain. The regional education minister, Poli Suárez, attributed the rise in Canary media to young people taking up work early in the service sector. It counts for PISA because those tested stand exactly at that threshold.

Government, unions, statistics

On 8 September 2026 the regional president, Fernando Clavijo, called for "tranquilidad y sosiego" — calm and composure — while conceding that "things are not going well", and described PISA as the report with the worst data in the historical series. The education department points to staffing: 29,046 teachers in the public system for the 2026/27 school year, 2,351 more than at the start of the legislature, plus reduced class-size guidelines, from 30 to 25 in the third year of secondary school among others.

The STEC-IC union counters with funding shortfalls and calls for smaller classes and more specialist support staff; the CCOO education federation demands more investment nationally. Neither case can be proved from PISA alone. And one obvious question stays open: PISA 2025 publishes no results for individual islands.

What the figures do not support

New in this cycle is computational problem solving: the Canaries 488 points, Spain 499, the OECD average 500 according to the reports quoted. The gap there is markedly smaller than in mathematics.

cita.news reported on 3 July 2026 on a different piece of research: the study by the Fundación Ramón Areces and the Ivie finding that 6.2 per cent of Canary pupils count as high performers. It analysed older PISA data and looked at the top; the present report is the new OECD round itself and looks at the bottom threshold.

For parents: PISA is not a school report and not a school ranking. What was tested is a sample of 1,645 15-year-olds at 50 Canary centres; it says nothing about any single school. The original data are at the OECD (oecd.org/pisa), and the Spanish breakdown by region at the Ministry of Education's Instituto Nacional de Evaluación Educativa (INEE).

Two cautions about the comparison figures in circulation. First, the OECD averages differ between sources: most reports give 463 points in mathematics, 461 in reading and 482 in science for PISA 2025 — a set consistent with the official OECD averages for 2022 (472 / 476 / 485). Some Canary pieces instead give 469 / 466 / 486, and 480 / 482 / 491 for the previous cycle; no OECD source could be found for that second set. We use the first. Second, comparisons with PISA 2022 only hold where both values are secure: in mathematics they are, at 447 points (2022) and 442 points (2025). For reading, two different 2022 figures for the Canaries are in circulation — so we make no before-and-after comparison.

FAQ

Does "below Level 2" mean these teenagers cannot do arithmetic?: No. They do not reach the threshold at which the OECD speaks of functional everyday competence — converting prices, for instance, without anyone setting out the method.
Are Canary schools worse than others?: PISA does not measure that. The survey estimates the result of a system from a sample. The strongest association in the Canary data is the social index of families.
How much is a 15-point difference?: By the OECD's rule of thumb about 20 points correspond to one school year, so 15 points would be about three quarters of that. The OECD warns against taking it literally: depending on the country the value lies between 7 and 26.5 points.
Are there results for individual islands?: No. PISA 2025 reports figures for the autonomous community, not separately for Tenerife, Gran Canaria or the smaller islands.
Where can I read the raw data?: In the OECD's international report at oecd.org/pisa and in the Spanish analysis by the INEE, each with a technical annex on the sample.

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