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The reading skills of Dutch teenagers have fallen further, and the country is slipping further behind other nations, according to a major new international study. Nearly four in ten 15-year-olds in the Netherlands now read too poorly to keep up properly at school, a finding that has renewed alarm about the state of Dutch education.
What the study found
The figures come from PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment, run every three years by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It tests the abilities of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science across dozens of countries, this round covering some 91 nations, making it one of the most closely watched barometers of how school systems compare.
The 2025 results, published this week, show that Dutch pupils’ reading skills declined further between 2022 and 2025, at roughly the same pace as in the previous period. Because reading also fell elsewhere but the Netherlands continues to drop, its position relative to other countries has worsened again. The Dutch score was once again below the average of both the European Union and the OECD as a whole.
An alarming number of children fell short of the basic standard. IN the report, 39 percent of Dutch 15-year-olds score below “proficiency level two”, the level regarded as the minimum needed to take part properly in school and society. In the group of comparable EU countries, the average is around 29 percent. Pupils below that threshold, the researchers warn, are likely to struggle at school and in life, and risk leaving secondary education functionally illiterate.
A long decline, not a sudden one
This is not a new problem, and cannot be simply pinned on the pandemic: the trend has been building for two decades. Where Dutch 15-year-olds scored above the European average in 2003, their results have steadily fallen since. In 2018, Dutch reading dropped below the OECD average for the first time, and the gap has widened at every measurement since. In 2018, one in four students couldn’t read well enough. Today it is four in ten.
However, in mathematics and science, Dutch pupils’ average scores held steady, and in maths the Netherlands still performs relatively well. It is reading, specifically, that keeps declining.
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Why it is happening, and what it is not
The obvious culprit, the use of phones and screens, is part of the conversation, but the experts do not blame it as the sole culprit. We can compare the statistics to equally digitised countries, where young people still read well. That suggests the problem is not simply the use of screens, but something more common across the Netherlands.
Researchers point instead to a changing reading culture and, above all, to a collapse in reading enjoyment: Dutch pupils are among the least motivated readers measured, and children have largely stopped reading for pleasure. There are also long-standing concerns about how reading is taught. Critics argue that lessons in “reading comprehension” have become mechanical and strategy-focused, teaching pupils to skim for answers rather than to engage with a text, with one widely used textbook reportedly even advising students not to read the whole passage because it takes too long. This results in pupils learning techniques for passing tests without developing a genuine ability to understand and enjoy what they read.
Why it matters, and what happens next
Reading is, as the state secretary for education put it, “the basis for everything”: pupils who cannot read well enough struggle not only with Dutch, but with every subject that depends on understanding a text, and later with further study, work and taking part in society. A large group leaving school with weak literacy has consequences well beyond the classroom.
The government says it is responding. From this school year, schools are working with new, more concrete and more ambitious core objectives (kerndoelen) for Dutch and mathematics, replacing ones dating from 2006, and the state secretary has promised an action plan this autumn with a greater focus on basic skills, and on language in particular.