Ireland Results – Emerald Archives

At a Glance

Study Frame

PISA 2025 is described by the Educational Research Centre as a global study by the OECD that assesses 15-year-olds in science, reading, mathematics, and an innovative domain that changes each cycle. The ERC says Ireland participated with 90 more countries and economies, and that this national report compares Irish performance with earlier cycles and with OECD and EU averages. The report also notes proficiency levels and links performance to student- and school-level factors. ^[1]

A separate ERC page states that the PISA 2025 main study in Ireland took place in March and April 2025. It reports more than 6,000 students from 172 schools, with principals, science coordinators, and parents or guardians also completing questionnaires. That page adds that results were released on 8 September 2026, and that the field trial had been carried out between March and April 2024 in 53 schools with over 2,000 students. ^[3]

Overall Picture

The ERC summary page says Ireland outperformed most other participating countries across all four domains and stood above the OECD and EU averages in each of them. It gives a mean science score of 500 points, above the OECD average of 482 and the EU average of 476. The same page says science remained relatively stable versus previous cycles, while reading and mathematics declined compared with earlier cycles, and similar declines also appeared at OECD and EU level. ^[4]

For reading and mathematics, the same summary reports Irish mean scores of 500 and 480 points, both above the corresponding OECD and EU averages. It also states that computational problem solving was assessed only in 2025 as part of the innovative digital domain, and that Ireland’s mean score there was 511 points, again above the OECD and EU averages. These are direct comparisons within the report; they do not by themselves explain why the pattern appeared. ^[4]

Distribution Patterns

The ERC summary also describes the distribution of achievement. Ireland had lower proportions of low performers than the OECD and EU averages in science, reading, and mathematics. The same passage notes that Ireland’s mathematics top-performer share, at 6.1 percent, was below the OECD average and close to the EU average. In science, the top-performer share was above the EU average but similar to the OECD average, while reading was the only domain where Ireland exceeded both averages. ^[4]

The ERC says these patterns are broadly consistent with previous cycles. That is an explicit continuity claim, but the page does not give a detailed cycle-by-cycle table in the excerpted text. Within the material available here, the strongest directly supported comparison is that Ireland combines comparatively low shares of low performers with a more uneven picture at the top end, especially in mathematics. Any broader interpretation would go beyond the text on the page. ^[4]

Group Differences

The ERC summary reports clear differences by gender, immigration status, grade level, and school type. Boys outperformed girls on average in science, mathematics, and computational problem solving, while girls outperformed boys in reading. Second-generation immigrants in Ireland performed strongly across all domains and significantly outperformed peers in mathematics and computational problem solving. First-generation immigrants had the lowest performance across all domains except computational problem solving, where they did better than non-immigrant students. ^[4]

The same page says students in Transition Year performed better than those in other grade levels, and that students in secondary schools and non-DEIS schools performed better, on average, than peers in other school types. These are the only group-pattern claims directly visible in the excerpted text, so they should be read narrowly. They show that the Irish average masks internal variation, but not the causes of that variation. ^[4]

Publication Context

The ERC publication page identifies the PISA 2025 performance report for Ireland as a report by Anastasios Karakolidis, Brendan Duggan, Andrew Keating, and Natasha Toole, published in 2026. A related ERC page says PISA 2025 results were released on 8 September 2026. The ERC’s archive and previous-cycles pages show that Ireland has participated in PISA since 2000 and list earlier Irish reports for 2022, 2018, 2015, 2012, 2009, 2006, 2003, and 2000. ^[1] ^[3] ^[5] ^[6]

The archive page also lists a 2025 ERC report on the well-being of Irish adolescents based on PISA 2022. That does not alter the 2025 results themselves, but it shows the continuing use of PISA data in ERC research. The archive also contains earlier methodological and topical publications, which indicates an established reporting series rather than a one-off release. These are observable publication facts, not inferences about policy impact. ^[6]

Related Metrics

A CSO education release published in October 2026 gives a wider statistical setting for Ireland’s education system. It reports that Ireland’s primary-level student-to-teacher ratio was 12.7 in 2024, below the EU27 average of 13.3, and that the upper secondary ratio was 14.2, above the EU27 average of 11.3. The same release also states that more than two-thirds of 25-34 year-olds in Ireland held a third-level qualification in 2025, the highest rate in the EU27. ^[2]

These CSO figures are not PISA scores and should not be treated as direct explanations for the 2025 assessment results. They do, however, show that the Irish education pages used here place PISA alongside other indicators such as staffing ratios and third-level attainment. In this restricted reading, the evidence supports a comparative portrait of Irish education, while leaving the links between indicators and PISA outcomes unproven in the cited texts. ^[2] ^[4]