We have failed our future

Malta likes to talk about the future. We have strategies for 2030, visions for 2050, digital ambitions, artificial intelligence plans, productivity reports and endless discussions about becoming a higher-value economy. Yet the most important investment Malta can make in any of those ambitions is sitting in classrooms today. On that measure, the latest evidence should make us profoundly uncomfortable. 

The PISA 2025 results are not simply another education report to be discussed for a few days before the political cycle moves on. They are a warning about Malta’s future productive capacity. PISA assesses 15-year-olds not simply on what they can remember, but on whether they can solve problems, think critically, communicate and apply knowledge to unfamiliar situations. In other words, it attempts to measure precisely the capabilities that increasingly determine whether people, firms and ultimately countries can prosper in a knowledge-intensive economy. On this measure, Malta has gone backwards. 

The numbers are brutal. In 2025, Malta performed below the OECD average in mathematics, reading and science. Performance declined from 2022 in all three subjects. More worryingly, reading and science results were lower than in any previous PISA assessment in which Malta participated. Compared with 2015, the proportion of low-performing students increased by 15 percentage points in mathematics, 12 points in reading and four points in science. These are not marginal fluctuations around an otherwise reassuring trend. They point towards an education system struggling to equip a significant share of a generation with the basic capabilities required for the economy we claim we want to build. 

Consider what the proficiency figures actually mean. Only 56% of Maltese students reached at least Level 2 in mathematics, compared with 65% across the OECD. Just 5% were top performers. In science, 63% reached the baseline level compared with an OECD average of 74%, while only 5% reached the highest levels. Reading is even more disturbing. Only 52% reached baseline proficiency compared with 69% across the OECD. That means almost one in two Maltese 15-year-olds did not reach the level at which students can identify the main idea in a moderately long text, locate information using sometimes complex criteria and reflect on a text’s purpose when directed to do so. Only 2% were top performers in reading, against an OECD average of 6%. 

It is difficult to reconcile those numbers with our rhetoric about becoming a knowledge economy. 

For years, Malta has been reassured by excellent headline economic results. GDP expanded rapidly, employment reached record levels, unemployment remained low, government revenues grew and new economic sectors continued to arrive. These are real achievements. But they have also created an extraordinarily dangerous illusion that because the economy is performing well today, the foundations of prosperity must also be strong. They are not the same thing. 

Economics is ultimately about choices across time. A country can maximise today’s output while underinvesting in tomorrow’s productive capacity. Indeed, Malta’s recent economic model made that relatively easy. When firms needed to expand, additional labour could be imported. When domestic skills were unavailable, they could often be sourced internationally. When consumption increased, GDP increased. When population increased, domestic demand increased. When construction expanded to accommodate that growth, economic activity increased again. The machine became extraordinarily effective at producing immediate economic results. 

Education operates on an entirely different clock. A child entering primary school today will influence Malta’s productive capacity for decades. Improvements made to teaching, literacy, numeracy and critical thinking may take years before they become visible in productivity statistics. Political systems naturally struggle with investments whose returns materialise beyond the next election, while GDP rewards activity occurring now. We have therefore become exceptionally good at managing the numerator of today’s economy while neglecting one of the most important determinants of tomorrow’s. 

The bill will eventually arrive. 

A more demanding economic model 

This matters particularly because the economic model Malta now says it wants is much more demanding than the one that produced the growth of the past decade. We want higher wages. Higher wages require higher productivity. We want businesses to compete through innovation rather than labour costs. Innovation requires sophisticated human capital. We want artificial intelligence and digitalisation to transform firms. Technology complements skills far more effectively than it compensates for their absence. We want Maltese businesses to scale internationally. That requires managers, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and workers capable of analysing information, solving unfamiliar problems and continuously learning. 

Yet half of our 15-year-olds are struggling to reach baseline reading proficiency. 

That contradiction should dominate Malta’s economic debate. 

We have spent enormous political energy debating where the next economic sector will come from, how many workers Malta needs, what tax incentives should be offered, which infrastructure project should be built and how artificial intelligence will transform productivity. These questions matter. But none is more fundamental than the quality of the people who will inherit the economy. Human capital is not another pillar of economic strategy. It is the foundation underneath virtually every other pillar. 

There are warning signs beyond the test scores themselves. Around 45% of Maltese students reported having skipped at least one full day of school during the two weeks before the PISA assessment, compared with an OECD average of 22%. In science lessons, 43% reported that noise and disorder disrupted most or every lesson, compared with 31% across the OECD, while 42% said classmates did not listen to the teacher, against 29% internationally. The OECD notes that the improvement in disciplinary climate observed across participating countries between 2015 and 2025 was not replicated in Malta. These are not merely educational statistics. They say something about the seriousness with which learning is being treated. 

A national failure 

The picture is not uniformly bleak, and recognising that is important. Maltese students report relatively strong teacher support. Curiosity and perseverance are around or above OECD averages, disadvantaged students show relatively strong academic resilience and socio-economic background explains less of the variation in science performance in Malta than across the OECD generally. There is therefore capability within the system. This is not an argument that Maltese children cannot perform or that teachers have failed. Quite the opposite. The disturbing conclusion is that we have young people displaying many of the attitudes required for learning, yet the system is still producing weak and deteriorating aggregate outcomes. 

That makes this a national failure rather than a failure of children. 

We also need to stop believing that technology will rescue us. Malta’s students are already enthusiastic users of artificial intelligence. Some 56% reported using AI chatbots for learning at least weekly, compared with 46% across the OECD. Maltese students were also more likely than the OECD average to use AI for preliminary research, summarising texts and drafting assignments. There is something deeply revealing about a country in which students are adopting the tools of the future faster than average while their underlying reading, mathematics and science performance remains below average. 

Artificial intelligence makes foundational education more important, not less. When machines can produce text, retrieve information and perform routine cognitive tasks, human advantage increasingly lies in knowing whether the output makes sense, distinguishing evidence from assertion, asking better questions, reasoning across disciplines and applying knowledge creatively. A student who cannot comprehend a complex text does not become highly skilled because ChatGPT can summarise it. Without foundational capability, technology risks becoming a substitute for thinking rather than an amplifier of it. 

Asking why too many children cannot read 

The same mistake is visible in our wider economic model. We repeatedly reach for the visible solution rather than confronting the structural problem. Productivity becomes an AI strategy. Labour shortages become an immigration discussion. Innovation becomes a grant programme. Education becomes new buildings, tablets, curricula and announcements. Inputs are politically attractive because they can be photographed, counted and launched. Outcomes are harder. They require patience, accountability and the willingness to ask why, after years of investment and reform, too many children still cannot read, reason mathematically or apply scientific knowledge at the level expected of them. 

There is another uncomfortable finding in the PISA results. Malta is not simply being held back by disadvantage. Almost half of Maltese students fall within the top international quarter of the PISA socio-economic scale, yet students with similar socio-economic backgrounds in several leading education systems perform significantly better. That should eliminate one of the easiest excuses. This is not merely a story of insufficient resources or poverty determining outcomes. Something deeper is happening in how we organise learning, establish expectations and translate relative material advantage into educational achievement. 

That is why education reform cannot be another ministerial initiative. It has to become a national mission extending across governments. We need to rebuild from foundations: early-years development, literacy, numeracy, teacher quality and status, classroom discipline, vocational education, different forms of schooling, parental responsibility, lifelong learning and much stronger pathways between education and the changing structure of the economy. We need room for Studio Schools and other models that connect academic learning with real-world problem solving, technology, creativity and work. We also need much greater honesty about outcomes. Success cannot be measured by how many students progress through the system if progression disguises weak mastery of the skills upon which everything else depends. 

Most importantly, Malta must change the time horizon through which it judges economic policy. A new investment project may add to GDP next year. Another thousand workers may expand output almost immediately. Another development may generate transactions, employment and tax revenue. Improving the literacy of an eight-year-old may produce almost nothing visible in next year's national accounts. Twenty years later, however, that child may be the entrepreneur creating a company, the engineer designing infrastructure, the doctor treating an ageing population, the researcher generating intellectual property or the public servant designing better policy. 

That is the difference between economic activity and economic capacity. 

We have spent much of the past decade celebrating the former while assuming the latter would somehow take care of itself. 

It will not. 

Treating the PISA results seriously 

The PISA results should therefore be treated with the seriousness normally reserved for a fiscal crisis or a competitiveness shock because, in slow motion, that is what they could become. Today’s 15-year-olds will enter the labour market during the 2030s. If too many arrive without strong literacy, numeracy, scientific reasoning and problem-solving capabilities, businesses will face deeper skill shortages, productivity will struggle, wage aspirations will become harder to sustain and Malta will remain dependent on importing increasingly sophisticated human capital. There is nothing wrong with attracting international talent. An open economy should continue doing so. But importing skills cannot become the permanent substitute for developing our own. 

Malta has not failed economically. That is precisely what makes this moment so dangerous. Strong economic performance has allowed us to postpone difficult questions about the quality of the foundations underneath it. GDP told us that the present was working, and we allowed that success to reassure us about the future. 

The latest evidence should end that complacency. 

Malta’s greatest economic asset is not property, tourism, gaming, financial services or its tax system. It is the productive potential of its people. Every economic model eventually becomes obsolete. Human capital is what allows a country to build the next one. 

The PISA results suggest we have been far less successful at preparing today’s youngsters for tomorrow’s economy. And that may prove to be the most expensive economic failure of all.