Since its first edition in 2000 until its penultimate in 2018, Portugal has been the only OECD country to register a consistent positive trajectory of PISA results. In PISA 2022, this tendency has changed – Portuguese results dropped more than the average of European countries.

To promote a reflexion on concrete measures that might improve student learning, the Cascais Municipality and The Association of Early Childhood Education Professionals (APEI) organized a seminar called “Construindo o Futuro: PISA e as perspetivas da investigação sobre a educação escolar e a educação na infância” (Building the Future: PISA and Research Perspectives on School and Early Childhood Education), on February 24 and March 2.

Ana Balcão Reis, Scientific Director at the Nova SBE Economics of Education Knowledge Center, was a speaker at the Round Table “Reflexão sobre os resultados PISA em Portugal” (A Reflexion on PISA Results in Portugal).

The researcher pointed to the fact that Portugal has been the OECD country with the highest increase in immigrant students (7% in 2018 to 11% in 2022), having, nonetheless, a lower percentage of immigrant students than the OECD average. At the Cascais municipality, the immigrant percentages are higher than the national ones.

Immigrant students’ results in Maths are, on average, 32 percentual points lower than those of non-immigrant students (25 points lower if we remove the influence of their socioeconomic status). In Reading, they are 22 percentual points lower than those of non-immigrant students (15 points lower by removing the influence of their socioeconomic status).

With this in mind, Ana Balcão Reis suggested that the development of strategies that improve the integration of immigrant students in the Portuguese educational system is one of the aspects that should be taken into account to benefit the learning of all students, whether immigrant or not.

During this session, João Marôco looked at the evolution of PISA results since 2000 and Alexandre Homem Cristo focused his speech on inequality, the rise in low performing students and the drop in high performing students in PISA 2022.

This seminar took place in Agrupamento de Escolas Frei Gonçalo de Azevedo, São Domingos de Rana.