The former education minister João Costa assumed responsibility for Portugal's poor results in the 2025 PISA edition, but cleared the current Government of blame. Costa, who currently chairs the OECD's Education Policy Committee, framed Portugal's decline within an international trend that, according to him, was already evident before the pandemic.
The socialist identified social media and the effects of the pandemic as the main factors for the poor performance of Portuguese students, pointing out that this decline affects almost the entire OECD and not just Portugal. In this way, Costa rejected that the origin of the negative results lies in the curricular reforms he implemented during his term.
João Costa's statements came this Tuesday, the day the PISA study was officially released. The former government official took the opportunity to contextualize the Portuguese results within the international panorama, suggesting that educational difficulties are a global phenomenon and not a specific consequence of national education policies.
