Most coverage of PISA stops at the scores. We covered those too: the Philippines improved in science, reading and mathematics, and still finished near the back of 91 systems. But the two-hour test is only half of what the OECD collects. Every student also answers a 35-minute questionnaire about their home, their attitudes, their classroom and their habits, and every principal answers one about the school. The OECD's country note for the Philippines draws on both. Read on its own, it is a portrait of Filipino 15-year-olds that the headline numbers cannot give.
Four things stand out. Filipino students are unusually motivated, and unusually well supported by their teachers. They are also unusually poor, unusually likely to be bullied, and unusually heavy users of AI chatbots for schoolwork. And fewer than half of them believe intelligence can grow.
The interactive data
The charts below put the Philippines beside the OECD average on the questionnaire indicators the country note reports: who the students are, how they feel about school, what their classrooms are like, how they use technology, and how safe they are. Where the OECD provides earlier cycles, the charts show the trend.
Who took the test
Start with the cohort itself. In 2025, 8,072 students in 208 schools sat the assessment, representing about 1.75 million Filipino 15-year-olds. That is an estimated 82% of the age group; the remaining 18% are not in school at the grade level PISA samples, and their absence flatters every number that follows. All Philippine data met the OECD's technical standards, so the results carry no asterisk.
The single most important contextual fact in the country note is this: 51% of Filipino test-takers sit in the bottom quarter of socio-economic status among all PISA students worldwide. PISA's index of economic, social and cultural status places every student in every country on one scale. In the Philippines the largest group is the most disadvantaged group, and those students averaged 354 points in science. The OECD points out that in B-S-J-Z (China) and Türkiye, students of the same socio-economic background score significantly higher, which is a reminder that poverty explains a great deal but not everything.
Poverty and performance: a gap no wider than the OECD's
Within the Philippines, the 25% most advantaged students outscored the 25% most disadvantaged by 76 points in science. Across the OECD the equivalent gap is 85 points. Socio-economic status explains 13% of the variation in Philippine science scores, against 12% on average across the OECD. Between 2018 and 2025 the gap between the top and bottom quarters held steady, and performance improved by a similar amount at both ends.
This is easy to misread. It does not mean the Philippine system is equitable; it means the whole distribution sits low, and rich and poor Filipino students are separated by roughly the same distance as rich and poor students elsewhere. Some 11% of disadvantaged Filipino students still scored in the top quarter of national performance, the group the OECD calls academically resilient. That is close to the OECD average of 12%. One warning sign: between 2022 and 2025 the gap between the top-scoring 10% and the bottom-scoring 10% widened in science, even as the mean rose.
Motivated students, supportive teachers
If the questionnaire has good news, it is here. Filipino students report more curiosity than OECD peers (79% against 73%) and far more perseverance: 78% say they apply extra effort when work gets hard, against 60% across the OECD. Both shares rose since 2022, by 8.1 and 6.7 percentage points respectively, while the share who say school has been a waste of time fell 7.6 points, to 22%.
The same is true of study habits. Half of Filipino students say they often plan their approach to studying (OECD: 37%), and they lean on the people around them: 89% ask teachers for help when they need it and 90% ask classmates when they do not understand something, both well above OECD rates. Teachers, in turn, are described in unusually warm terms. In most science lessons, 86% of students say the teacher shows interest in every student's learning, 88% that the teacher keeps teaching until students understand, and 87% that the teacher gives extra help when needed. The OECD averages are 69%, 66% and 73%.
These attitudes pay off more in the Philippines than elsewhere. After accounting for socio-economic background, a one-unit rise in the curiosity index is associated with 29 more science points in the Philippines (OECD: 19), perseverance with 19 points (OECD: 13), and goal-setting with 19 points (OECD: 3). Students who reject the idea that school is a waste of time score 57 points higher than those who accept it, more than double the OECD gap of 27. In a system where the inputs are thin, the student's own disposition carries more of the load.
The mindset gap
One attitude runs the other way, and it deserves attention. Only 44% of Filipino students hold a growth mindset, the belief that intelligence can be developed through effort and feedback. Across the OECD, 69% do. This is a striking combination: students who work hard and persist, yet mostly believe the ceiling on their ability is fixed. The association with performance is real. Filipino students with a growth mindset score 33 points higher in science than those with a fixed one, after accounting for background, a larger gap than the OECD's 28. Mindset is also one of the cheapest things a school can change.
Classrooms: fewer missing teachers, more missing buildings
Principals' reports on resources tell a mixed story. The share of students in schools where a lack of teaching staff hinders instruction fell from 43% in 2022 to 19% in 2025, now half the OECD average of 39%. Shortages of assisting staff affect 25% of students, also below the OECD's 39%. Shortages of educational material such as textbooks, IT equipment and laboratory supplies eased from 55% to 48%.
Physical infrastructure moved the wrong way. In 2025, 58% of Filipino students attended schools where the principal said buildings, grounds, cooling, lighting or acoustics hindered instruction, up from 51% in 2022. That is consistent with the classroom shortfall EDCOM II has documented, and it is the one resource indicator in the note that got worse. Disciplinary climate, by contrast, is unremarkable by international standards: 19% of students say they cannot work well in most lessons and 30% report noise and disorder, both at or just below OECD rates, and only 21% say classmates do not listen to the teacher (OECD: 29%).
Devices, distraction and AI
Filipino students spend 1.7 hours a day on digital devices at school for learning, exactly the OECD average, and 1.3 hours for leisure, slightly above it. The distraction figures are less comfortable: 39% report that peers are often distracted by devices in most or all science lessons, against 28% across the OECD, and that distraction is associated with an 11-point science penalty. Yet only 21% of Filipino students attend a school that bans phones on the premises. The OECD average is 49%, and the Philippine share has actually fallen since 2022, from 30%, while the OECD's rose from 34%.
AI is the newest question in PISA and the Philippines answers it emphatically. 55% of Filipino students use an AI chatbot to help them learn at least once a week (OECD: 46%). They use it to summarise texts (45% against 30%), to draft writing assignments (42% against 29%) and to research new topics (37% against 31%). Only 5% say they never or almost never use AI for schoolwork; across the OECD it is 14%. Whether students are taught to judge what the chatbot tells them is a separate question, and one the OECD's dashboard tracks as "learning to assess AI-generated content in class." For a country where two in three 15-year-olds cannot yet read at Level 2, heavy reliance on tools that summarise and draft for them is a development to watch closely.
Bullying: the widest gap in the report
No indicator separates the Philippines from the OECD more than bullying. 47% of Filipino students report being bullied at least a few times a month, against an OECD average of 20%. Bullying rose between 2022 and 2025, as it did in most countries, reversing a decline between 2018 and 2022 that the OECD attributes to pandemic-era disruptions rather than to progress. Cyberbullying is rarer but sharper in its effects: 14% of Filipino students say upsetting information about them was posted online without their consent at least a few times a month, nearly five times the OECD rate of 3%, and those students score 49 points lower in science than their peers.
Home support is thinning. Reports of family involvement fell almost everywhere between 2022 and 2025, and the Philippines was no exception. In 2025, 54% of students said a parent or guardian asked them at least weekly what they did at school, down from 57%, and 38% had weekly conversations about problems at school, down from 45%.
Attendance: a quiet success
Truancy is the clearest improving trend in the whole note. The share of Filipino students who skipped a day of school in the two weeks before the test fell from 29% in 2018 to 25% in 2022 and 16% in 2025; the share who skipped a class fell from 34% to 30% to 15%. Both are now below the OECD averages of 22% and 24%. Lateness has been stickier, easing from 61% to 53%, still above the OECD's 50%. Students who are in the room can be taught; that is a precondition every other reform depends on.
The environment: willing, but under-equipped
PISA 2025 was a science-focused cycle, and it asked students about the environment specifically. Filipino students match or beat OECD peers on every attitude measured: 82% believe they can positively affect the environment, 83% believe collective action works, 78% say they know how to work with others to do so (OECD: 68%), and 65% are interested in environmental work in their future jobs. They also act on it more. Four in five had discussed with friends and family how to help the environment, against 56% across the OECD, and 64% had made a purchase based on sustainability. The gap is in knowledge: only 32% reached baseline proficiency in environmental science, against 74% across the OECD. For a country on the front line of climate risk, the will is there; the scientific literacy to act on it is not yet.
Why this matters for Malaya's work
The scores say the Philippine system is improving from a very low base. The questionnaire says why the base is so low and where the leverage is. Filipino 15-year-olds are poorer than almost any other PISA cohort, they are bullied at more than twice the OECD rate, and they sit in schools whose buildings are increasingly reported as inadequate. None of that is fixed by a curriculum.
But the same students are curious, persistent, help-seeking and, increasingly, present in class. Their teachers are described as attentive. And the attitudes that matter most for learning matter more in the Philippines than elsewhere: curiosity, perseverance and valuing school are each associated with larger score gains here than across the OECD. That is the opening Malaya's work is built for. Higher-order skills, critical reading of information (including AI-generated information), and a belief that ability can grow are exactly the levers that a low-resource, high-motivation system can pull.
"Filipino students are doing their part. The question the country note poses is whether the system around them — safe schools, sound buildings, and a belief that ability can grow — is doing its."
Sources: OECD (2026), PISA 2025 Results (Volume I): Future-Ready Students — Country Note: Philippines, written by Francesco Avvisati, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills, and the OECD PISA 2025 Database. All figures in this article are as reported in the country note. Score-point associations are after accounting for students' and schools' socio-economic profile. The OECD cautions that questionnaire-based indicators may reflect differences in response behaviour across countries. Prepared by the Malaya Initiative Foundation. Figures may be reproduced with attribution.