What the new PISA scores tell us about education in Albania

Some interesting news from the PISA 2025 results for Albania 🇦🇱

For those of you who aren’t sure what this is, PISA is the major international study run by the OECD which tests 15 year olds around the world in maths, reading and science, allowing education systems in different countries to be compared. Albania scored 433 in maths, 408 in reading and 435 in science, putting it ahead of several countries in the region in some areas, including Greece, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro.

On the surface, it also looks like an extraordinary improvement from PISA 2022, when Albania scored just 368 in maths, 358 in reading and 376 in science.

But there is some important context.

The OECD warned that Albania’s 2022 results were unusually low, with evidence that students did not engage seriously with the assessment. If you compare 2025 with the pre Covid 2018 results instead, the picture is much more measured. Maths is roughly back to its previous level, reading is slightly higher, while science appears to have made a more noticeable improvement.

There is also a caveat with the new results. Albania did not fully meet the OECD’s sampling standards for PISA 2025, with smaller schools, which tend to include more rural and disadvantaged students, underrepresented. Because of this, the OECD advises against making straightforward comparisons over time.

So this probably is not the overnight transformation of Albanian education that the 2022 to 2025 figures might initially suggest, but it is still some genuinely encouraging news, particularly given how Albania compares with a number of its neighbours.

For those of us living here, it is an interesting snapshot of an education system that is clearly developing, while also showing why international rankings sometimes need a little more digging than the headline numbers suggest.