The OECD Puts 40 Trillion Dollars on Basic Skills as 3 of 6 Gulf States Are Absent From PISA
The OECD published the first of three volumes of its 2025 student assessment on Tuesday, covering 91 countries and economies, more than 760,000 students and a population of about 33 million 15 year olds. Its average mathematics score fell from 485 points in 2015 to 463 in 2025 and reading from 489 to 461, which it calls the lowest averages it has recorded. Science fell from 489 to 482.
The organisation attaches a price to the bottom of that distribution. In the foreword its education director writes that these outcomes are one of the most powerful predictors of the long run success of economies, and cites Stanford University researchers estimating that if every American 15 year old reached the baseline Level 2, it could add more than 40 trillion dollars to the United States economy over their working lives.
That estimate is for one country and cannot be moved to another. What travels is the framing: the organisation itself treats baseline proficiency as an economic quantity, which is what makes the Gulf’s share of students below it a macroeconomic number rather than an educational one.
3 of the 6 Gulf states are not in the assessment
Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman do not appear on the participants list, in the report’s table of 91 entrants or in its reader’s guide. The organisation gives no reason for any country’s absence, and does not discuss non-participation at all.
For the 3 that did take part, and their Arab peers, the published measure is the share of students reaching each proficiency level.
| Share reaching Level 2 or above | Science | Mathematics | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| OECD average | 74 percent | 65 percent | 69 percent |
| United Arab Emirates | 65 percent | 60 percent | 58 percent |
| Qatar | 57 percent | 46 percent | 53 percent |
| Saudi Arabia | 51 percent | 32 percent | 40 percent |
| Jordan | 48 percent | 31 percent | 26 percent |
| Morocco | 23 percent | 16 percent | 13 percent |
From the individual country notes. Level 2 is the organisation’s baseline threshold, the same one the 40 trillion dollar estimate is built on. Ranked by the science column.
The weakest subject differs by country and the pattern is not uniform. Mathematics is the lowest of the three in Qatar and Saudi Arabia; reading is the lowest in the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Morocco. The spread between a country’s best and worst subject is 7 points for the United Arab Emirates, 10 for Morocco, 11 for Qatar, 19 for Saudi Arabia and 22 for Jordan, all on our calculation, so evenness across subjects does not track distance from the OECD average: Morocco is furthest below the benchmark and among the most even.
At the top of the distribution the United Arab Emirates is close to the OECD. It reports 7 percent of students at Levels 5 and 6 in mathematics against an OECD average of 8, and 6 percent in science against 7, while its baseline share of 60 percent in mathematics is 5 points below the OECD’s 65. Qatar reports 3 percent at those levels in science and mathematics and 2 percent in reading. For Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Morocco the organisation publishes no percentage at all at Levels 5 and 6, printing only that almost no students reached them.
Direction of travel, and against which year
The comparison year differs by claim. Against 2015, the organisation names the United Arab Emirates and Qatar among the systems whose science performance rose, and says both increased their share of top performers while reducing their share of low performers in science. Qatar’s country note puts its results significantly above 2015 in all three subjects. Against 2022, the United Arab Emirates is up in all three and so is Jordan, while Saudi Arabia is about the same in mathematics and reading and up in science, and Morocco is lower in mathematics and reading.
Across OECD countries 1 in 5 fifteen year olds is now a low performer in science, mathematics and reading together, up from 16 percent in 2022. Science was stable between 2022 and 2025 after falling from 2009, so the sharp declines are in the other two subjects. The organisation names most participating Chinese jurisdictions, Estonia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Chinese Taipei and the United Kingdom as ranking in the top ten across all three domains.
Why it matters: The organisation has put a number on basic skills, and its own baseline threshold is where the Gulf’s gap sits. In the 3 participating Gulf states, between 40 and 68 percent of students fall below Level 2 in mathematics on our calculation from the table, against 35 percent across the OECD, and the figure reaches 69 percent in Jordan and 84 in Morocco. The second limitation is coverage: only half the Council took part, so no complete Gulf comparison can be built from this exercise, whatever the scores show.
Outlook: Two further volumes follow. They will broaden the analysis but will not add Kuwait, Bahrain or Oman to the 2025 round, so the coverage gap is fixed until the next cycle. For the 3 Gulf participants the measure to watch is the baseline share rather than the average score, since that is the threshold the economic estimate is built on.
Sources: OECD.
