PISA 2025: When immigrant background meets educational inequality in Greece

The newly released PISA 2025 results reopen a difficult conversation about Greek schools. Fifteen-year-olds in Greece continue to score below the OECD average in science, reading and mathematics. Behind the national averages, however, lies an even more troubling reality: not all children have the same chances of succeeding in the Greek school system.

This becomes particularly clear when we look at the performance of students with an immigrant background.

A wide educational gap

According to PISA’s definition, students with an immigrant background are those whose parents were both born in a country other than the one where the assessment takes place. The category includes both first-generation students, who were born abroad, and second-generation students, who were born in the host country.

The distinction matters. When we speak of “students with an immigrant background”, we are not necessarily speaking of children who arrived in Greece recently. Among them are children who were born here, have attended only Greek schools and have spent essentially their entire educational trajectory in Greece.

And yet the performance gap remains wide¹.

In science, for example, students in Greece without an immigrant background score 448 points on average, compared with 387 for students with an immigrant background (Figure 1). This is a difference of 61 points, larger than the average gap recorded across OECD countries.

This is not a minor statistical deviation. It is a substantial educational gap.

Figure 1: Student performance in Greece and the OECD, by immigrant background

Source: IMRU elaboration based on OECD (2026), PISA 2025 Results (Volume I): Future-Ready Students, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/73451bc5-en, Tables I.B1.2d.7–I.B1.2d.12 (https://stat.link/6gtbnx).

But is immigrant background the cause?

Here, great care is needed.

The easy reading of the results would be that students with an immigrant background “do worse”. But this is only a surface reading.

The OECD itself notes that differences in performance can rarely be attributed solely to immigrant background. These students often face more than one obstacle at once: lower socio-economic status, fewer educational resources at home, language difficulties and, in some cases, harder conditions of school and social integration (Figure 2).

Figure 2: PISA 2025 Greece. What lies behind the educational gap?

Source: IMRU elaboration based on OECD (2026), PISA 2025 Results (Volume I): Future-Ready Students, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/73451bc5-en, Tables I.B1.2d.4 and I.B1.2d.6 (https://stat.link/6gtbnx), Figures I.2.21 and I.2.22 (https://stat.link/xgs41b).

And this is perhaps the most important finding for Greece.

Greece belongs to the group of OECD countries recording one of the largest socio-economic differences between students with and without an immigrant background. The gap in the share of socio-economically disadvantaged students between the two groups exceeds 40 percentage points.

In other words, in Greece immigrant background intersects far more often with social inequality.

And when a child has to contend with financial constraints, reduced access to educational resources and possible language difficulties all at the same time, the distance from their classmates is not created in the PISA examination room. It has begun to form much earlier.

Language matters – but does not explain everything

A second factor is language.

Across the OECD, a large share of students with an immigrant background speak a language at home that differs from the language of the assessment. The phenomenon is more pronounced among first-generation students.

This has obvious implications for an assessment such as PISA. To solve a science or mathematics problem, it is not enough for a student to know a formula or a scientific concept. They must understand the text, evaluate information, work out exactly what is being asked and formulate reasoning.

Language proficiency, therefore, runs through almost every form of school learning.

But language is not a sufficient explanation either. And this is perhaps one of the most interesting conclusions of PISA 2025. When the OECD takes socio-economic status and the language spoken at home into account, in many countries the gap between students with and without an immigrant background narrows considerably. In some education systems, students with an immigrant background even outperform their peers when children with comparable social and linguistic characteristics are compared.

This radically changes how we should read the results.

The gap is not inevitable

PISA data also dismantle another widespread claim: that the more students with an immigrant background an education system has, the lower its overall performance will inevitably be. The data do not support this assumption.

Countries with large shares of students with an immigrant background can at the same time achieve very high educational performance. This means that the presence of immigrant populations is not in itself an educational “problem”. What is decisive is how the education system receives, supports and integrates children.

For Greece, therefore, the question should not be “why do the children of immigrants not perform as well as other children?”

The more productive question is a different one: what does the Greek school system do – or fail to do – so that a child’s social, linguistic and cultural starting point does not determine their educational path?

A problem that did not appear in 2025

This picture is not new.

Research examining Greek performance in previous PISA cycles had already identified a negative relationship between immigrant background and school performance. Indeed, the negative effects were generally larger for first-generation students, while the gap between second-generation students and their Greek peers had shown a tendency to widen.

This is particularly significant. If even children born and raised in Greece continue to show systematic educational inequalities, then the issue cannot simply be attributed to the difficulty of “adjustment” among newly arrived students.

It also concerns the capacity of the education system itself to turn the presence of different languages, cultural experiences and social starting points into equal learning opportunities.

From measurement to policy

PISA cannot tell us everything about an education system. Performance in an international test does not capture the whole of a child’s experience, nor every form of knowledge and learning.

It can, however, serve as a warning.

And in the case of Greece, the PISA results tell us that greater investment is needed in early language support, in strengthening schools with high concentrations of socially vulnerable students, in intercultural education and in properly preparing teachers for multilingual and culturally diverse classrooms.

But something more is needed too: we must stop treating integration as a process in which the child simply has to “adjust” to the existing school.

An inclusive education system also adapts itself to the needs of its students.

The PISA 2025 results, therefore, do not concern only children with an immigrant background. They concern Greek schools as a whole. Because the real test of an education system is not only how well its best students perform, but how effectively it can prevent social and linguistic inequalities from turning into educational inequalities.

And in this respect, the new data tell us that in Greece we still have a considerable distance to travel.

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1. The full set of PISA 2025 data on students with an immigrant background is available at https://stat.link/6gtbnx ↩︎

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Interdisciplinary Migration Research Unit (IMRU) or the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE).

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