SENATOR Joel Villanueva hailed the Philippines’ best-ever performance in the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), while urging the government to sustain investments in teachers and education reforms to build on the country’s gains.

In a privilege speech, Villanueva said the Philippines improved its scores in Science, Mathematics, and Reading, with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recognizing the country as the fastest-improving nation in reading over the past decade.

The senator congratulated Education Secretary Sonny Angara, the Department of Education (DepEd), the PISA 2025 Task Force, teachers, education partners, and the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM 2) for the achievement.

PISA, conducted every three years by the OECD, assesses the knowledge and skills of randomly selected 15-year-old students worldwide.

In 2025, more than 760,000 students from 91 countries participated, including about 8,000 Filipino students from 208 schools.

Villanueva recalled that the Philippines ranked at the bottom in Reading and near the bottom in Mathematics and Science during its first PISA participation in 2018.

He noted that the country’s performance remained largely unchanged in 2022 following the pandemic, but the 2025 results marked its highest scores across all three learning domains.

The proportion of Filipino students reaching baseline proficiency also increased, with Science rising from 23% to 32%, Mathematics from 16% to 21%, and Reading from 24% to 31%, he said.

Citing OECD Director for Education and Skills Andreas Schleicher, Villanueva said no country had improved its reading performance faster than the Philippines since the 2022 assessment.

He also cited research estimating that bringing all Filipino learners to at least PISA’s baseline proficiency could contribute about $14 trillion to the Philippine economy over their working lifetimes.

Villanueva credited the 2018 PISA results with exposing the country’s learning crisis and helping spur the creation of EDCOM 2, which has since supported reforms including the Excellence in Teacher Education Act, the Expanded Career Progression System for Public School Teachers, and the Academic Recovery and Accessible Learning Program.

Despite the milestone, Villanueva stressed that the work is far from over. He called for continued investments in teacher education and training, reduced administrative workloads for educators, and greater resources for schools.

“The latest PISA results should give us hope, but they should also give us urgency,” Villanueva said, urging lawmakers to use the improvement as a springboard for deeper and more meaningful education reforms.