Family socioeconomic background ‘big influence’ on Pisa, says PAGE

A parents’ group says Malaysia’s 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) results highlight the strong link between students’ socioeconomic backgrounds and their academic performance.

Parent Action Group for Education (PAGE) chairman Noor Azimah Abdul Rahim said the country’s science results showed an 82-point gap between students from the top 25% and bottom 25% of socioeconomic backgrounds – a difference equivalent to nearly three years of schooling.

“This is a social mobility issue. It shows family background still has a big influence on a student’s achievement, unfortunately,” she said when appearing as a guest on yesterday’s episode of the Keluar Sekejap podcast.

“Schools should be the solution. They should reduce the gap a child brings from home, not a place where the gap becomes clearer.

“That’s why intervention needs to be focused on the students and schools that need support most, not a one-size-fits-all approach.”

Noor Azimah was responding to a question from host Khairy Jamaluddin on the widening gap between urban, more affluent schools and rural schools, where the students are from lower-income families.

The former minister said the 82-point gap in science scores showed “quite a large” difference between urban or affluent-area schools and those in more rural areas, which he said was concerning.

Both Noor Azimah and Khairy said this pointed to a broader theme running through the 2025 Pisa results – that Malaysia’s education challenges may not be solvable through curriculum reform alone.

They pointed instead to classroom-level factors – including teacher workload, administrative burdens and the quality of teacher-student engagement – as more likely drivers of uneven outcomes than the content of the syllabus itself.

Malaysian students’ Pisa performance in science in 2025 rose three points to 419. Reading increased five points to 393, while mathematics fell 11 points to 397, continuing a decline recorded in the 2018 and 2022 assessments.

Administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Pisa is a triennial survey of 15-year-old students that assesses their acquisition of key knowledge and skills needed for full participation in society.

Only 35% of Malaysian students met the baseline proficiency level in mathematics, meaning nearly two-thirds could not reliably apply basic mathematical reasoning to real-world problems.

Khairy also highlighted a paradox in last year’s Pisa results: while mathematics scores had declined, Malaysian students performed better than expected in computational problem-solving.

“Interestingly, 82.6% of Malaysian students performed better than expected. They were among the highest, in the top six,” Azimah said.

“This suggests our children have the ability to adapt, use resources and solve problems when the learning context differs.

“So the question is, why doesn’t that strength translate into basic maths mastery? Again, maybe we need to look at how we teach, not just what we teach.”

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