Study
The United Arab Emirates in PISA 2025
The United Arab Emirates recorded its largest PISA gains in 2025. This note asks how much of that gain is improved learning rather than a changed test population, what separates the country's very different school systems, and how far the measurement itself can be pushed.
Data and approach
The note combines the published PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS and early learning results for the United Arab Emirates with new calculations on the OECD public use files for 2022 and 2025, covering the student, cognitive and process files. Every new estimate uses the final student weight, all ten plausible values and all 80 replicate weights, and every national figure the OECD published for both cycles was reproduced from the public files before any new analysis was run.
What the analysis finds
- Mathematics rose 21.5 points, science 26.1 and reading 15.5 between 2022 and 2025, and reading has returned to its 2015 and 2018 level rather than exceeding it
- Holding the 2022 mix of school sectors and immigration backgrounds in place leaves a gain of about 9 points in reading, 14 in mathematics and 19 in science
- The gain survives sampling, trend linking, changed composition and wider coverage combined, with every lower bound above zero
- British-curriculum private schools lead public Ministry schools by 148 points in mathematics, and about 60 percent of that is who the pupils are and who else is in their school
- Reading improved below the median and not above it
- Between three and four items in ten function differently in the Arabic version of the test, but the differences cancel, so the national mean stands while subscale profiles do not
- The same birth cohort gained relative ground between Grade 4 and Grade 8 and held it at fifteen
What the evidence cannot establish
No reform, programme or curriculum is identified as the cause of the improvement, because a repeated cross-sectional assessment cannot identify one and because the major recent initiatives postdate the assessment. No result describes Emirati pupils, because PISA records where a pupil and their parents were born rather than their citizenship. The unexplained part of the school-sector gap is a residual containing everything unmeasured about selection, and is not an estimate of what a curriculum contributes. The language audit does not invalidate any published score.
Published country note
The United Arab Emirates in PISA 2025, 34 pages with 24 figures, a methods annex and 53 published sources. Download the PDF.
Figures and data
Every figure ships with the exact values behind it. Download the figures and data package: the 24 figures as images and vector files, their plotted values as CSV, an Excel workbook with a live chart for every figure, the methods annex and the list of published sources.
Part of International comparative policy research Measurement comparability
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Published as
- 2026The United Arab Emirates in PISA 2025Center for PsychologyCountry note