Austria's reading competence in alarm state: 1.7 million affected!

Austria's reading competence in alarm state: 1.7 million affected!

A current OECD PISA study brings alarming news for Austria: Around 1.7 million adults fight with basic reading problems. This affects about 29 percent of adults in the country-a terrifying increase compared to the 17 percent in 2013. With 254 points, the reading skills of Austria are significantly below the OECD average of 260 points, while neighboring countries such as Germany and Switzerland do better with 266 points. Finland takes the top with 296 points. The situation for 55 to 65-year-olds is particularly worrying, where 46 percent of the respondents can only manage simple reading tasks, such as kosmo.at

Andreas Schleicher, Education Director of the OECD, explains that adults functional illiterate who can only read simple texts fail because of elementary challenges that a primary school student should master. This is not an isolated case for Austria, because even in an international comparison, reading skills in the past ten years has only improved in Finland and Denmark. Although the number of people with a migration background has increased, their effects on the test results are comparatively low, which emphasizes Schleicher. The reading skills between descendants of migrants and locals have hardly any significant differences.

rising reading problems require measures

ILKIM Erdost, head of education in the Vienna Chamber of Labor, calls for immediate investments in adult education to improve the general terms of education for future generations. In view of the rising unemployment and the changes caused by climate change on the labor market, good education is indispensable in order to ensure employment ability. Another alarm sign is the increase in reading problems with the respondents without language barriers: This group shows an increase in the problems of 16 percent in 2013 to 27 percent in 2023, which is also underlined by blitzrechner.de