ZAMBIA POSTS MAJOR GAINS IN PISA 2025
The country records sharp improvements in reading and science as OECD says Zambia has a strong foundation to build on
By Francis Maingaila ♥️
Lusaka, Zambia24 -- 8-09-2026 -- Zambia has recorded major gains in the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), with learners showing marked improvements in reading, mathematics and science compared with the country’s previous performance.
The results point to a significant shift for Zambia, which in the past struggled to keep pace with other participating countries.
Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education, Dr Kelvin Mambwe, has challenged policymakers and other stakeholders to make practical use of the findings instead of allowing the report to gather dust on shelves.
Dr Mambwe said the results should help the country determine whether the investments and reforms being made in education are translating into better learning outcomes.
He said Zambia’s participation in PISA was about generating evidence on where the education system was doing well, where it was falling short and what could be learned from other countries.
“It is an opportunity to learn from our own data rather than learning from social media critics,” Dr Mambwe said.
He said the findings could also help Zambia identify policies and practices from other education systems that could be adapted to improve learning outcomes locally.
Dr Mambwe said the results came at a time when Government had introduced free education and recruited more than 40,000 teachers, while also investing in school furniture, school grants, expanded school feeding programmes, classrooms and new schools.
“It is against this background that we are receiving the 2025 PISA results for Zambia and assessing whether the investments that have been put in our education system are bearing fruit,” he said.
He said PISA complements national assessments and public examinations because it looks beyond the ability of learners to recall information and examines how they apply what they know to real-life situations.
Dr Mambwe said this approach was in line with Zambia’s 2023 Education Curriculum Framework and the country’s move towards competency-based education.
He said the education system must prepare learners to think critically, solve problems, communicate effectively, apply knowledge to everyday situations and adapt to change.
Dr Mambwe said evidence from PISA for Development (PISA-D) had also helped inform reforms such as lowering the primary school entry age from seven to six years and reducing the duration of primary education from seven to six years.
He said earlier assessments had shown the need for Zambia to move away from teaching and assessment that placed too much emphasis on memorising information towards applying knowledge and skills.
The Ministry, he said, would now look closely at what the latest findings meant for teaching and learning, teacher development, the curriculum, assessment and school leadership.
“We must ensure that data and evidence do not remain confined to reports,” Dr Mambwe said.
He said the findings must translate into better decisions and, ultimately, better learning outcomes for Zambian children.
Dr Mambwe also thanked the OECD for its technical support, the World Bank and Zambia Education Enhancement Project for financial support, the Examinations Council of Zambia (ECZ) for coordinating the assessment and the schools, learners and parents who took part.
Dr Chilala said PISA looks at how 15-year-olds use their knowledge, skills and abilities to solve problems rather than simply testing what they can remember.
“PISA basically assesses the capabilities of 15-year-olds to solve problems, to use the knowledge, skills and abilities they have, mainly to solve problems,” Dr Chilala said.
He said Zambia first took part in PISA-D in 2018 and was among the pioneer Anglophone countries on the continent to participate in the programme.
Dr Chilala said the 2025 assessment was Zambia’s first participation in the main PISA programme, although the basic principles of the assessment remained broadly similar.
He said the release of the results had come at an important time, as the new Government was preparing to take office, giving the findings an opportunity to shape its education agenda.
“The government is about to be formed and, as it forms, we are basically launching the results, meaning that they can contribute to the agenda of the new government as it begins to move forward,” he said.
Dr Chilala said the findings also fitted into President Hakainde Hichilema’s Grow Zambia agenda, under which education had been placed at the centre of national development.
He said the results would be useful as Government worked on the Ninth National Development Plan.
Dr Chilala said the comparison between Zambia’s 2018 PISA-D results and the latest assessment showed a notable improvement.
He said there had initially been concern that the rapid increase in the number of learners entering school would put pressure on performance.
“Normally, what we are used to in education is that when the numbers of learners increase, performance goes down,” Dr Chilala said.
He said the PISA findings had instead provided international evidence to support improvements already being seen in national examinations and assessments.
Dr Chilala said the results would be compared with findings from the 2026 National Assessment Survey, which was expected to be finalised and disseminated before the end of the fourth quarter.
“What we can say is that these results have given us confidence that whatever measures Government is putting in place to improve learning, those measures seem to be yielding positive results,” he said.
He said the next task was to establish which interventions were making the biggest difference so that they could be strengthened.
“What we now need to do is to build on PISA by finding out which factors may actually be affecting learning more positively so that we can even work to improve the performance of learners even more,” he said.
Dr Chilala said measures such as school feeding, the recruitment of teachers, learning modules developed by the Curriculum Development Centre and catch-up programmes were among the interventions that needed to be examined.
He said PISA had also strengthened the capacity of ECZ staff to work with large datasets, process and manage information and carry out deeper analysis, skills that were now being used in other areas of the council’s work.
“PISA has not just ended on giving us the PISA results, but it has also helped expose our team to a lot of opportunities to learn and, through that process, we have been able to gain skills that we are using in all other areas,” he said.
Dr Chilala said Zambia’s participation had also given ECZ an opportunity to interact with other education systems and learn from countries that were performing strongly.
“We are promising that we will not end here. We will put to good use the skills we have learned and will continue working with the Ministry to ensure that the current education reforms succeed in the best way,” he said.
He said Zambia should continue taking part in PISA, particularly the 2029 cycle, so that the country could track whether the gains recorded in 2025 were being maintained.
Dr Chilala thanked President Hichilema and Government for supporting Zambia’s participation in the assessment.
He said PISA was designed to find out whether learners could use what they had been taught to reason, communicate and solve problems they could face in real life.
Bousquet said more than 760,000 students from 91 countries and economies took part in the 2025 assessment, representing about 33 million 15-year-olds worldwide.
Science was the main subject assessed, with reading and mathematics also included.
He cautioned against reducing PISA to a league table, saying the results were more useful when countries used them to understand what was working and where changes were needed.
For Zambia, Bousquet said, the results provided a good base to build on.
He said the proportion of learners performing at the lowest levels was not as high as might have been expected from Zambia’s overall position, which he described as encouraging.
Bousquet also pointed to Zambia’s relatively small gap between boys and girls, saying their performance patterns were broadly similar compared with the wider differences seen in some education systems.
He said student attitudes were another area where Zambia had encouraging signs.
Almost 60 percent of Zambian learners disagreed with the idea that intelligence is something fixed and cannot change.
Although this was about 10 percentage points below the OECD average, Bouquet said it was still a positive sign because learners who believe they can improve are more likely to keep trying when schoolwork becomes difficult.
Zambian students were also about 10 percentage points above the OECD average in their willingness to work harder when schoolwork became challenging.
Students also placed a relatively high value on school, with Zambia recording a result more than 10 points above the OECD average on whether learners viewed school as useful and worthwhile.
Bousquet said such attitudes matter because learning is shaped not only by what happens in the classroom but also by how learners think about education and their own ability to improve.
He also pointed to the importance of teachers, saying Zambia’s recruitment of teachers was a positive development at a time when many education systems were struggling to attract and retain enough teachers.
He said teachers needed to be valued and given the conditions they needed to do their work properly.
Bousquet cautioned, however, that simply putting more money into education would not automatically produce better results.
He said that after a certain point, additional resources would have less effect unless they were accompanied by improvements in teaching, curriculum, school safety, staffing and learning time.
He said socioeconomic inequality was another issue that Zambia needed to watch closely, particularly the differences between learners and schools at the top and bottom of the performance scale.
Digital technology also emerged as an important issue.
Zambian students reported using digital devices for almost two hours a day on average, which was lower than the OECD average.
Bousquet said moderate use of technology for learning could be linked to better performance, while excessive use could work against learning.
The issue, he said, was therefore not simply whether learners used technology, but how they used it.
He also touched on artificial intelligence, saying about a third of students who reported using AI for tasks such as summarising and drafting said they did so occasionally.
He cautioned that the relationship between AI use and performance was not straightforward, noting that some high-performing education systems had relatively low levels of daily AI use.
Bousquet said learners needed to be taught how to use AI responsibly, including checking information, understanding its limitations and judging whether sources could be trusted.
He said bullying and cyberbullying were also areas that deserved attention, with the 2025 assessment looking more closely at cyberbullying.
Learners who experienced bullying tended to have poorer feelings about school and lower performance, while cyberbullying showed a particularly strong link with learning outcomes.
Bousquet said absenteeism was another concern, as students who frequently missed classes generally performed worse.
He said parents also had a role to play, with learners tending to do better when parents asked about school, communicated with teachers and school leaders and showed that education mattered.
Bousquet said family involvement had fallen in many countries since 2022, although Zambia did not have a long-term trend to compare and started from a position close to the OECD average.
He said teacher involvement and support had increased in many education systems as countries dealt with teacher shortages.
Bousquet urged Zambia to treat the 2025 results as a starting point rather than the end of the journey.
He said the 2029 PISA assessment would be critical in determining whether Zambia can sustain the gains recorded in 2025 and whether ongoing education reforms are translating into improved learner outcomes.
According to Bousquet, Zambia’s 2018 participation in PISA-D provided an earlier benchmark, while the 2025 assessment provided a stronger basis for tracking progress.
He said the 2025 assessment was paper-based, but Zambia would move to a computer-based assessment in 2029, allowing for the collection of better and more detailed data for analysis.
Bousquet congratulated Zambia’s learners, teachers, school administrators and parents for their contribution to the assessment and expressed optimism about the country’s education system.
National Coordinator for PISA, Dr Shadreck Nkoya, said the latest results were encouraging because Zambia had improved learning outcomes while at the same time bringing more children into the education system.
He said Zambia’s reading score rose from 275 points in 2018 to 325 points in 2025, a gain of 50 points, while science increased from 309 to 357 points, an improvement of 48 points.
Mathematics also improved from Zambia’s 2018 position.
“Those gains are particularly significant because more than 2.5 million additional children have entered school following the introduction of free education,” Dr Nkoya said.
He said Zambia had achieved the improvement at a time when a sharp rise in enrolment could have been expected to put pressure on learning outcomes.
“Rather than seeing the quality of education go down, we have seen improvement. This is not common in education,” Dr Nkoya said.
He attributed part of the progress to increased investment in education, saying Zambia was no longer simply “closing the door” when compared with other countries.
Dr Nkoya said Zambia had also performed better than Kenya and Rwanda in the 2025 assessment, a result he said might have surprised those accustomed to seeing Zambia near the bottom of international education comparisons.
He said the progress was particularly important given Zambia’s economic circumstances.
Dr Nkoya recalled that in 2018, Zambia’s science score of 309 points was well below the international average of 395 points.
In reading, Zambia’s 275 points was below Senegal’s 306 and Cambodia’s 321 points, while in mathematics Zambia scored 258 points against 304 for Senegal and 325 for Cambodia.
He said the latest results showed that Zambia had moved significantly from that position, but warned that the gains would need to be protected and built upon.
Dr Nkoya cautioned that national averages could hide serious differences between schools.
“There is a clear pathway. Inequality is one of the things we have seen. There is a lot of inequality between schools,” he said.
He said Government and education authorities would need to give targeted support to schools and learners who were still falling behind.
Dr Nkoya said PISA involved ordinary schools from across the country and was not limited to high-performing institutions.
He said Muyambe Primary School was among the schools that participated.
Dr Nkoya said the results should therefore be used to identify what was working and where schools and learners needed more support.
He said the outcome-based curriculum and other education interventions could help Zambia hold on to the progress it had made, but Government would still need to close the wide gaps between schools.
Dr Nkoya said the results were a reason for Zambia to celebrate, but stressed that there was still a long way to go.
Comments
Post a Comment