The UAE’s 15-year-olds rank second in the world for setting themselves goals, sixth for asking for help, and eighth for sticking at work when it gets hard. Seventy-two per cent say they put in extra effort when work becomes challenging; the OECD average is 60%. That is my favourite finding in the PISA 2025 results published on 8 September, and it sits underneath everything else in this piece.[1]
The headlines are earned
The results the newspapers led with are also true, and the country is right to be pleased with them. Science rose 26 points between 2022 and 2025, mathematics 21 and reading 15, in a cycle where the OECD average fell in all three – by 3, 9 and 14 points respectively. Some 34,639 students in 1,070 schools sat the test. Over the full decade, the UAE is one of only five systems anywhere – with Montenegro, Qatar, the Slovak Republic and Türkiye – to have reduced its share of low-performing students while increasing its share of top performers in science.[1]
The equity story between 2022 and 2025 is the best in the volume. Disadvantaged students improved by 40 points against 19 for their advantaged peers, narrowing the gap by 21. The OECD notes that across most systems the narrowing of that gap came from advantaged students declining; in the UAE, Georgia and Uzbekistan it came from disadvantaged students rising, from a starting point below 400. Socio-economic background now explains just 3.3% of the variation in science scores, against an OECD average of 11.6%.
And on KHDA’s own cut of the data, Dubai’s private schools entered the world’s top ten in every domain: sixth in reading at 501 points, eighth in mathematics at 511 and science at 522, ninth in the new computational problem-solving domain at 534. Emirati students in Dubai’s private schools gained 31 points in mathematics and 30 in science over the cycle.[2]
Where the scores actually sit
Improving fast is not the same as being there yet. The UAE remains below the OECD average in all three subjects: 458 in science against 482, 453 in mathematics against 463, 433 in reading against 461. Just over one in three students, 35.1%, is a low performer in science, against 25.7% across the OECD, and 26.6% of UAE students are low performers in all three domains at once.[3]
The spread is the number that describes the system best. The gap between the strongest and weakest tenth of students is 289 points in science and 301 in reading, the fourth widest in the world in both. The OECD also notes that over the whole decade, unlike the last three years, the UAE’s science gains were driven by high achievers improving while low achievers did not significantly move – which widened that gap even as the average rose. A country improving fast, and a two-speed system inside it: both are in the data, and a school leader reading only the first will misjudge their own school.
Two smaller findings deserve a place in the record. Only 36.2% of the UAE’s teachers are fully certified by the appropriate authority, the second-lowest share of the 82 systems with data. And reading fluency – the speed and accuracy with which students judge whether a sentence makes sense – declined between 2018 and 2025 even as comprehension of longer texts improved.[1]
The number nobody posted
PISA 2025 asked students whether they feel they belong at school. In the UAE, 73.8% said yes. The OECD average is 76.2%. On the OECD’s index of belonging the UAE sits at −0.01 against an average of 0.09: below the line, in a system whose students out-persevere and out-plan almost everyone else on the planet.[1]
We know what that gap costs, because the Department for Education published the evidence a fortnight ago. Its linked study of PISA 2022 responses and GCSE results found that students who strongly disagreed they belonged at school finished close to a full GCSE grade lower across all eight subjects than those who strongly agreed, after prior attainment, background and bullying were accounted for – an association rather than a cause, and a large one. The same study found that the six-item composite measure of belonging showed no significant relationship with attainment, while the single direct question carried the whole signal. Ask children plainly, and they tell you.[4]
There is a Dubai-specific reading of the number, from practice rather than from the tables. Belonging is harder to build in a city where a third of a form group may be new in September and a fifth will have left by July, where a school offers one of 17 curricula to families from a hundred countries, and where a child’s sense that the place is theirs has to be rebuilt more often than in a village school in Devon. The determination the data shows is real, and much of it is the determination of children who have moved before and expect to move again. Determination is what a child brings through the gate in the morning. Belonging is what the school gives them back.
What to do with it this term
The practical lesson follows the DfE’s finding. Ask every child the direct question – do you feel you belong at this school – in the first weeks of term, and again at the end of each one. Record the answer alongside the attainment data rather than beneath it. Look at who says no, by year group, by how recently they arrived, by language. Then act on the pattern, not the average: the child who says no in September is telling you something the tracking spreadsheet will take a year to show.
That is the conviction Ten Points is built on, and it is written on the front of our website: behaviour begins with belonging. The daily journal, the check-in and the recognition a child receives are all ways of asking, every day, whether school feels like theirs – and of seeing the answer next to their behaviour, so the adults who need to notice, notice early. The UAE has the determination and the trajectory. Belonging is the part a school can move this term.
If you lead a school and would like to see how that looks in practice, the first step is small: a conversation. Book a call.
