Azorean students improved their performance compared with 2022 in the latest PISA assessment, continuing signs of progress also observed in national examinations. Yet the archipelago remains below Portugal’s national averages, prompting teachers’ unions and political leaders to warn that social inequality, staffing, school infrastructure and the growing dominance of screens remain substantial obstacles.
Educational progress is rarely a straight line, and statistics can tell two apparently contradictory stories at once. The PISA 2025 results offer the Azores precisely such a picture: the Region has improved since 2022 and appears to be narrowing part of its historic distance from national performance, but its 15-year-old students continue to score below Portuguese averages in the principal areas assessed. For teachers’ representatives, the improvement deserves recognition—but not complacency.
Fernando Vicente, president of the Azores Teachers’ Union (SPRA), sees the results through the larger question of social inequality. He argues that students from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds continue to perform worse, suggesting that public education is not yet sufficiently counteracting disadvantages inherited outside the classroom. “The school continues to reproduce social inequalities, which it should not do,” he says. “The school should combat them, should attenuate them.” In a region where socioeconomic disparities remain significant, the observation raises a fundamental question: how much can schools compensate for inequalities that children bring with them through the classroom door?
Vicente argues that greater investment in public education must be part of the response, together with policies addressing inequality more broadly. At the same time, he points to recent regional measures intended to make teaching more attractive, stabilize the teaching workforce and improve working conditions, particularly in preschool and primary education, as possible contributors to the Azores’ improvement. Above all, he insists that the progress cannot be separated from teachers themselves: “One cannot fail to consider that the evolution of these results also has to do with the role of teachers.”
António Fidalgo, president of the Democratic Union of Teachers of the Azores (SDPA), similarly emphasizes that the positive trend extends beyond PISA and has also been visible in national examinations. Considering teacher shortages and, in some cases, deteriorated school facilities, he regards the movement toward the national average as evidence of sustained work within Azorean schools. But considerable distance remains. His priorities include adequate numbers of teaching and non-teaching personnel, improved infrastructure and equipment, greater professional stability and confidence in teachers’ autonomy in the classroom.
One of the most striking concerns shared by both union leaders is the increasingly pervasive presence of screens. With PISA results declining across many OECD countries, the role of digital technology in education and in young people’s lives has become an important subject of debate. Fidalgo does not reduce the issue simply to prohibition. Schools, he argues, must teach students that screens can be useful while also helping them understand the consequences of excessive use. He points to northern European countries that were early adopters of classroom technology but are now reconsidering some of those approaches as research evolves. “We also have to reflect quickly,” he says.
Vicente is particularly critical of an educational model in which digital devices become dominant. Unlimited access to social media and screens, together with the Region’s use of digital textbooks, concerns his union. His formulation returns the discussion to something much older than technology: “The textbook should be the mediator and not the student’s principal instrument. The student’s principal instrument is the relationship he has with his teacher.” It is a significant distinction. The question is no longer whether technology belongs in education—it clearly does—but whether technology should support human teaching or gradually displace the relationships upon which learning depends.
The PISA findings have also entered regional political debate. PS/Açores deputy Inês Sá described them as a “warning sign,” emphasizing that Azorean students remain below national averages. She compared the current results with those of 2015, when the Region recorded 470 points in Science, 470 in Reading and 462 in Mathematics. According to the figures she cited, the 2025 scores remain 9 points lower in Science, 30 lower in Reading and 22 lower in Mathematics. “Recovery compared with 2022 is positive,” Sá argues, “but recovering from the worst result does not mean that we have arrived where we want to be.”
That may be the most useful way to read PISA 2025 in the Azores: neither as evidence of failure nor as justification for celebration, but as evidence that improvement is possible and unfinished. The archipelago has moved forward from 2022 despite difficulties involving staffing, infrastructure and social inequality. The challenge is to turn that recovery into a sustained trajectory.
Education, after all, is ultimately measured in more than points. It is measured by whether a child born into poverty receives a genuine opportunity to transcend it; whether a teacher has the conditions to teach rather than merely endure; whether technology enlarges curiosity instead of consuming attention; and whether an island’s geography and social circumstances become part of a student’s identity without becoming the boundaries of that student’s future.
The numbers are improving. The more difficult work is ensuring that the lives behind them improve as well.
Based on a story in Diário Insular, José Lourenço-director. The photos are from DI and Escola Jerónimo Emiliano de de Andrade Facebook page.