The PISA-2025 results have shown that despite the full-scale war, Ukrainian teenagers managed to maintain their educational performance at approximately the 2022 level. However, the problems remain severe: depending on the subject, between 35% and 46% of students lack basic knowledge and skills, and the gap between students from large cities and villages is equivalent to about three years of schooling. At the same time, the majority of teenagers believe that abilities can be developed, and they use artificial intelligence for learning more often than their peers in OECD countries.
In the early 2000s, as the world was rapidly changing, the ability to simply memorize and reproduce facts lost its former value. In response to these changes, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), aimed at showing how well school systems worldwide prepare 15-year-olds for real-life challenges. This age was not chosen randomly: in most countries, this is when compulsory basic education concludes, and teenagers face choices regarding their future life paths. The study assesses reading, mathematical, and scientific literacy, and consistently introduces innovative domains (such as the ability to learn in a digital environment) to measure skills that are critically necessary in the modern world, yet rarely found in standard school curricula.
These data formed the basis of the National Report on the results of the international educational quality study PISA-2025, which was presented in Kyiv on September 8 by the Ukrainian Center for Educational Quality Assessment (UCEQA) and the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, with the support of UNICEF. The document was prepared by UCEQA analysts supported by the OECD. In addition to the full version of the report, a summarized overview—“PISA-2025: Key Results and Conclusions”—was also presented.
During the report’s presentation, the head of UCEQA, Tetiana Vakulenko, emphasized that collecting this data in current realities is a testament to the high level of public trust in the assessment system:
I am personally grateful to everyone who tries to support us when reading the news about the results of the EIE (External Independent Evaluation), NMT (National Multi-Subject Test), or PISA. It is only thanks to you that this system remains alive. This system lives on due to a high level of trust. The results of various educational assessments, in rural and urban areas, the ratio of boys’ results to girls’, well-being, NMT results across different categories—these all prompt the right dialogues and discussions, and we must direct all our efforts toward meaningful conversations about these outcomes. We can debate annually about what the format of educational assessments—entrance or graduation exams—should be. And these are the right, meaningful dialogues. As long as we do not devalue what we do and as long as we know why we do it. We are doing this for the future. We take every step to build a better education system.
Tetiana Vakulenko also noted the complexity of conducting the study and the exceptional conditions under which it took place:
I would also like to thank the team—the employees of the Ukrainian and regional centers for educational quality assessment, and the educators who are involved daily in conducting educational assessments under very difficult conditions. PISA 2022 took place in October, amidst 24/7 shelling. And we pulled it off. Thank you for making that happen. PISA 2025 was slightly easier for us because we already know how to do it, but it remains a difficult task.
children heading to the bombshelter
Ukraine has participated in the PISA international educational quality study three times: in 2018, 2022, and 2025. When comparing Ukraine’s indicators with the OECD averages across all three cycles (2018 — 2022 — 2025), the dynamics are as follows:
The PISA-2025 report, published in September 2026, offers cautious hope: the freefall of results observed in 2022 amid the full-scale invasion has stopped. The education system managed to stabilize, though it does not yet show signs of full recovery. Ukraine has not yet returned to its 2018 benchmarks (in particular, the drop in reading literacy remains the most noticeable), but Ukrainian students held their ground in mathematics and science. As a result of the current PISA cycle, Ukraine’s lag behind the OECD average remains evident:
- In mathematics, the gap is 32 points (equivalent to about 1.5 years of schooling), and 46% of students do not reach the baseline level.
- In reading literacy, the gap reaches 43 points (equivalent to about 2 years of schooling), and 45% of students remain below the baseline level.
- In science, the gap is 34 points (about 1.5 years of schooling), while 35% of teenagers did not cross the baseline threshold.
One of the problems PISA examines, and which Teach For Ukraine specifically targets, is educational inequality between urban and rural students. While in 2018 the gap in educational achievement between cities and villages was 2.5 years of schooling, and in 2022 it sharply jumped to 4.5 years, the 2025 results show it narrowing to 3 years. However, researchers explain that this gap decreased not because rural schools made a leap forward, but because the performance of students from large cities declined (specifically in mathematics, where there was a significant drop from 501 to 460 points).
Resilience Against Exhaustion: Motivation of Ukrainian Students Despite the fact that academic results are impacted by the war and the pandemic, the PISA-2025 questionnaires revealed something valuable and unexpected: Ukrainian teenagers demonstrate psychological resilience and a high level of motivation.
According to the report, 85% of Ukrainian teenagers feel they belong at their educational institution. This is the highest indicator among all reference countries. Additionally, 82% of children easily make friends at school. These figures are growing (in 2018, it was 78%). Amid constant air raid alerts, forced displacement, remote learning, and loss, school has become a place for teenagers to build a sense of community belonging and socialize with peers. This very school community and the sense of belonging provide the potential for educational recovery.
Furthermore, 68% of Ukrainian students share a “growth mindset”—believing that intelligence and abilities can be developed through effort (compared to the OECD average of 71%). 63% note they are curious and love learning new things (OECD — 69%), and 54% demonstrate perseverance, putting in extra effort despite difficulties (OECD — 60%). More than half of the students in a country resisting terror maintain the drive to develop, even though Ukraine’s figures are slightly lower than the OECD average.
A special feature of PISA-2025 was the analysis of how modern children use technology, particularly artificial intelligence.
54% of Ukrainian teenagers use AI chatbots as a learning aid at least once a week. This significantly exceeds the OECD average, which stands at 46%.
But the most important aspect is how children interact with these assistants. Students use AI for preliminary information searches (37%), summarizing texts (42%), and preparing their own materials (43%). At the same time, 78% of teenagers note that they critically evaluate the quality of AI-generated information (compared to 63% on average in the OECD). Children are adapting quickly and seeking digital tools for self-help, though this creates new challenges for educators—namely, updating the rules of academic integrity.
Ukraine is a young state at 35 years old. For a third of this time, we have been defending ourselves against Russian military aggression. While other nations spent decades building infrastructure and prioritizing education, we were forced to defend ourselves, and in the meantime, move away from the Soviet educational model, adapting our schools to a European, human-centric, and digital learning system.
Amid these challenges, Ukrainian society has done and continues to do everything possible to ensure education fulfills its function: being equitable and unlocking the potential of every child, regardless of birthplace or residence, and for the past 12 years—despite the severe impact of war on our progress. The most significant step toward this equity was the implementation of the External Independent Evaluation. The New Ukrainian School reform has been ongoing since 2018.
Another vital stage of change was Ukraine’s participation in collecting data on the learning outcomes of Ukrainian teenagers, without which quality reforms are impossible.
That is why Ukraine first joined PISA in 2018. When the study first launched in the early 2000s (the first cycle took place in 2000 with 32 participating countries), the young Ukrainian state was only just building its own institutions after decades of a Soviet past. By the time of Ukraine’s PISA debut in 2018, the study already covered over 70 countries, becoming a global standard for evidence-based education, which we consciously joined as soon as we gained the institutional capacity to do so.
When Ukraine first joined PISA testing in 2018, right before the COVID pandemic, 5,998 students from 250 schools participated. It was revealed that 36% of Ukrainian teenagers did not achieve the baseline (minimum necessary for life) level in mathematics, and about 26% in reading and science.
The next PISA testing cycle was scheduled for the spring of 2022. The testing coincided with the start of the full-scale invasion, so data collection was postponed to the autumn. Teenagers took their test in October—a month remembered by Ukrainians for the start of massive missile strikes on energy infrastructure and the first blackouts. Due to occupation and active combat, the study physically could not cover the entire country; it was conducted only in 18 regions, with 3,876 teenagers from 164 schools participating. At that time, the OECD completely suspended Russia’s participation in the PISA study. The 2022 results captured the educational losses stemming from the pandemic and the war—scores dropped across all subjects. 42% of students did not overcome the baseline threshold in mathematics, 41% in reading, and 34% in science.
In 2025, during its third cycle of the study, Ukraine is the only country in the world participating in PISA amidst a prolonged major war. Nearly 9,000 students from 298 educational institutions across 17 regions were able to join the testing. The main focus this year was science, alongside two innovative domains—the ability to learn in a digital environment and English language assessment. The 2025 study results, presented in September 2026, showed that there was no statistically significant decline in results, and such stabilization amidst a prolonged war testifies to the resilience of the education system, although it does not signify its recovery.
When analyzing the dynamics of the results and trying to grasp the real state of affairs, it is crucial to consider the context in which the study is conducted and the sample itself. Over the years of the full-scale war in Ukraine, the composition of the population and the student body has changed due to mass emigration, internal displacement, and temporary occupation. Furthermore, territorial coverage differs: in 2018, the study was not conducted in the temporarily occupied territories of Crimea and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions; in 2022, active combat also made testing impossible in the Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson regions, and in 2025, the Sumy region was added to this list.
Such variations in the samples could have affected the overall picture of the results. The study covered territories with varying degrees of security challenges, shelling intensity, and access to in-person or blended learning. Regions with the most difficult security conditions and the greatest destruction of educational infrastructure were excluded from the 2022 and 2025 samples, meaning the study results do not fully reflect the deep educational losses and challenges specifically in frontline communities.
According to World Bank estimates, due to disruptions in the educational process, the current generation of schoolchildren worldwide risks losing about 17 trillion dollars in future earnings. For Ukraine, this is also a matter of national security. A state resisting an aggressor needs engineers for complex defense systems, cybersecurity specialists, architects, and agricultural experts with advanced technologies. Ukraine’s chances of recovery directly depend on whether education can unlock the potential of children who will inherit the challenges associated with the war and the aftermath of the pandemic.
As Tetiana Shvets, Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences and Head of the Research Department at Teach For Ukraine, points out, the publication of the PISA-2025 results brings public attention back to the scale of the educational crisis in Ukraine:
For the Teach For Ukraine team, this research is especially important because since 2016 we have been systematically working on the issue of educational inequality, and since 2022—on the educational losses that PISA specifically measures. This international report provides us with an important macro picture—showing where the country stands relative to the rest of the world. At the same time, complementing the global assessment, our task as a non-governmental organization is to explore and understand processes at the micro level in individual classrooms, especially in frontline communities. The opportunity to look at the educational situation in the country through the PISA study, alongside our own grassroots research, gives us an understanding of how to act effectively moving forward and how to work locally with specific children and teachers.
According to Tetiana Shvets, the work of analyzing such large-scale and influential studies like PISA, combined with the practical research conducted by Teach For Ukraine, proves that data fulfills critical functions:
Data analysis allows us to separate the real root of the problem from its symptoms. Behind statements like ‘the children failed math,’ there can be a completely different issue. In the ‘Educational Losses in Primary School During Wartime’ study by Teach For Ukraine, the results of which will be published on the organization’s website in September, teachers identified word problems as the most difficult topic (51% of respondents). But a word problem is primarily a skill of meaningful reading: the ability to dissect vocabulary, keep the condition in mind, and build a logical model. If a child mechanically decodes letters but does not understand the content, they will not solve the task, no matter how many hours they spend practicing calculations. Accurate data points to the root cause of educational difficulties.
Data debunks myths that hinder progress. It is most convenient to attribute children’s difficulties to ‘gadget addiction’ or ‘parental indifference.’ However, the PISA results from 2018, 2022, and 2025 confirm that these losses are not personal, but systemic. They are the consequence of air raid alerts, prolonged online learning, power outages, forced displacement, and a lack of adult support nearby. This understanding allows us to stop looking for someone to blame and start adapting the learning environment.
Research activities at Teach For Ukraine precede every project. We reject intuitive decisions: every one of our projects is shaped at the intersection of qualitative, quantitative, and experimental data,” explains Tetiana Shvets. “To work based on data means to respect the time of a Ukrainian child who today learns to the sound of sirens, and to provide them with knowledge that will serve as a foundation for their entire future life.
The National Report on the study’s outcomes illustrates where Ukrainian education stands now and where it needs to head next.
Achieving a baseline level of literacy must become priority #1 for Ukraine’s educational system. Currently, in each of the three core domains—reading, mathematics, and science—at least a third of students fail to achieve the minimally required level of knowledge, and 29% of teenagers face difficulties in all three areas simultaneously.
Special attention is required in the domain of reading, as reading literacy is foundational and directly impacts outcomes in all other disciplines. The ability to critically evaluate a text, deeply comprehend its meaning, accurately interpret task conditions, and distinguish facts from manipulation dictates a student’s success not only in language classes but also when solving mathematical problems or analyzing scientific processes. When reading suffers, a chain reaction complicates learning in every other sphere.
The quality of education and student success still largely depend on socio-economic backgrounds, place of birth or residence, and educational trajectories. Teenagers from smaller municipalities consistently demonstrate lower results due to resource deficits in their educational institutions, clearly indicating a need for targeted support for such schools, students, and educators.
Against this backdrop, the school—as a safe space and community—remains the primary foundation for recovery. A high level of psychological belonging, trust, and support from teachers creates a unique resource for the mental recovery of children, even amidst a major war. This is exactly where public efforts should be directed.
Teach For Ukraine operates at the intersection of state challenges and the needs of children and teachers. The organization’s activities aim both to overcome educational inequality between urban and rural areas and to bridge educational gaps while supporting the students most affected by the war. The Educational Support Program helps students in frontline territories catch up on their knowledge free of charge through supplementary classes, tutoring, and mentoring support. To support teachers and provide high-quality methodological materials, the organization creates special training materials and educational series that equip educators with tools to work with children right now. Another distinct area of the organization’s work is conducting research.
