Saudi Arabia PISA 2025 Results: What to Tell Parents

A school communications team now has one job the PISA 2025 release just made harder: say the science gain out loud without leaving the gap out of the same sentence. Saudi Arabia’s PISA 2025 results show a science score of 413, up 23 points from 390 in 2022 — a far bigger jump than the +4 the country posted between 2018 and 2022, when science moved from 386 to 390. Reading edged up five points to 387. Math gained one point, to 390. All three subjects still sit well below the OECD average: science trails by 69 points, math by roughly 73. What do you tell parents, and how do you say it without a number coming back at you out of context? Three practices below turn these numbers into one parent announcement instead of a scramble — skip to them if you just need the checklist.

PISA 2025 Saudi Arabia Score: The Numbers Behind the Headline

Before any message goes out, the scores parents can look up themselves:

• Science: 413 (+23 vs. 2022) — OECD average 482, a gap of 69 points
• Reading: 387 (+5 vs. 2022)
• Math: 390 (+1 vs. 2022) — OECD average 463, a gap of roughly 73 points
• Overall rank: 46th of 91 participating countries and economies
• OECD average, for comparison: 482 in science, 463 in math

The science trajectory is the one worth showing on its own: 386 in 2018, 390 in 2022, 413 in 2025 — three cycles, one of them a clear jump Makkah Newspaper. The 2025 score and the 23-point gain since 2022 are confirmed by the OECD’s own results tables OECD, PISA 2025 Results Volume I — Student performance. Reading rose five points and math rose one. That is the honest shape of the release: a clear gain in one subject, small movement in the other two, and the country remains closer to the bottom of the OECD comparison than the middle in every subject tested.

How Did Saudi Arabia Do in PISA 2025? Rank, Equity, and the Ceiling Problem

Ranking 46th of 91 tells only part of the story. Two other figures matter more for how a school frames this internally: across science, reading, and math combined, just 0.6% of Saudi students reached top-performer level, while 44% were classified as low-performing Makkah Newspaper. A 23-point science gain and a 44% low-performing rate are both true at once — the average moved up while the distribution underneath it stayed wide.

There is a genuine equity signal inside the science gain: lower socioeconomic-status students gained on the order of 15 points in science between 2022 and 2025, against roughly 17 points for more advantaged students Makkah Newspaper. Read both figures as roughly 15–17 points — precise enough to show both groups gained, not precise enough to call the two-point gap between them closed or widened.

The Saudi PISA Science Score 2025: What Moved Alongside It

One data point from the same PISA cycle is worth naming, carefully. The share of students in Saudi schools whose principals reported that a shortage of teaching staff hindered instruction fell by more than 25 percentage points between 2022 and 2025 — one of the largest such improvements recorded in this cycle, alongside Belgium and Hong Kong (China) OECD, PISA 2025 Results Volume I — Student school life and beyond.

It is tempting to connect that directly to the science gain. This is correlation, not proof: PISA’s once-every-three-years design can’t show the shortage drop caused the score gain, only that both moved in the same window — worth naming together, not as cause and effect.

What Else Might Explain the Gain

Two concurrent trends complicate a simple read. Saudi education spending declined an estimated 2.3%, from SAR 204 billion in 2024 to roughly SAR 199 billion in 2025, even as national spending overall rose sharply over the past decade Vision2030.ai. A November 2024 policy change also removed mandatory professional licensing for teacher bonuses and practice and exempted teachers over 50 — a rollback that coincided with a mixed 8th-grade TIMSS picture: math edged up three points while science fell 12 points and stayed below its 2011 level, even as 4th-grade scores rose Vision2030.ai. Separately, Saudi Arabia’s National Assessments of Learning Outcomes Program (NAFS) reached roughly 1.5 million students across nearly 26,000 schools by May 2025, part of a broader push toward measurement and accountability that runs alongside the score data rather than inside it World Bank Blogs. None of this isolates a single cause — the science gain, the funding cut, and the licensing rollback are concurrent entries in the same three-year window, not a tested chain of cause and effect, and a school communication should not present any one of them as the explanation.

What This Means for Your Parent Communication

The numbers above are usable. What a school does with them is a separate decision, and it’s the one most likely to go wrong under time pressure.

Lead with the Number, Not the Interpretation

State the science score and the gap in the same sentence, before any framing about what it means. Schools that want to get ahead of a parent forwarding a partial headline would need to publish the plain figures first and the school’s own commentary second, not the reverse.

In practice, this looks like a single announcement — sent through your school’s official channel, not a class WhatsApp group — three to five sentences long, published within a week of the national release: “Saudi Arabia’s PISA 2025 science score rose 23 points to 413. Reading rose five points; math rose one. All three subjects remain below the OECD average. Here’s what we’re watching for [grade band] next year.” One channel, one version, translated for every family’s stated language rather than assuming everyone reads the same one.

Pair the Gain with the Gap

A message that cites only the +23 invites a parent to find the 69-point gap themselves, on the OECD’s own site, and ask why the school didn’t mention it. Pairing both numbers costs one extra sentence and removes that risk entirely.

In practice, this looks like adding a single line to the same announcement — not a separate memo — naming the OECD average alongside the Saudi figure: “For context, the OECD average science score is 482; ours is 413.” No further interpretation is required in the initial message; a gap this size doesn’t need editorializing to register.

Give Parents Somewhere to Ask Questions

A one-way announcement about national test scores will generate questions a broadcast message can’t answer — “what does this mean for my child’s grade,” “is the school doing anything differently this year.” Schools that want to avoid those questions arriving as scattered replies-all or hallway conversations would need a defined channel for them before the announcement goes out, not after the first reply comes in.

In practice, this looks like naming a specific reply path in the announcement itself — a class-level or grade-level group channel, monitored by a named staff member, open for a set window (say, two weeks) after the release — rather than leaving parents to guess whether a reply to the announcement will be read.

Getting the Message Consistent Across Every Family

None of the three practices above is hard on its own. What’s hard is doing all three the same way for every class, every grade, and every language a school serves — one announcement that goes out through email to some families, WhatsApp to others, and a paper note to whoever missed both, with three slightly different versions of the same two numbers by the time it’s done. That’s an operational problem, not a communication-strategy problem, and it’s the reason purpose-built parent-communication platforms exist: one message, sent once, delivered through each family’s own official channel and in each family’s own language, with a record of who received it.

BeeNet is one way to run that workflow for schools — announcements that go out through a single official channel per school or class, in each family’s stated language preference, with delivery tracked centrally rather than scattered across group chats. If your school is weighing how to handle results announcements like this one consistently across every class, see how BeeNet’s announcements feature works or book a demo.

The PISA 2025 results are already public, and parents who look them up will find both the gain and the gap in the same report. That part isn’t a decision a school gets to make. What’s still open is timing: whether the school’s own message reaches families this week, or whether a parent’s own search does it first. This is happening either way — the only question is when your school sends the version with the full picture in it.

References

1. Makkah Newspaper. “السعودية تقفز 23 نقطة في العلوم بنتائج PISA 2025” (Saudi Arabia jumps 23 points in science in PISA 2025 results). 2026. https://www.makkahnews.sa/5519067.html
2. OECD. “Student performance in PISA 2025.” PISA 2025 Results (Volume I). 2026. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en/full-report/student-performance-in-pisa-2025_23e075c2.html
3. OECD. “Student school life and beyond.” PISA 2025 Results (Volume I). 2026. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en/full-report/student-school-life-and-beyond_861e5904.html
4. Vision2030.ai. “Saudi Universities Rise as School Results Lag.” 2026. https://vision2030.ai/analysis/saudi-education-outcomes-rankings-vs-schools/
5. Saadah, Fadia; Caillaud, Fadila; Elsayed, Mahmoud. “Improving education in Saudi Arabia through evaluation and assessment.” World Bank Blogs. November 6, 2025. https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/arabvoices/improving-education-in-saudi-arabia-through-evaluation-and-assessment