Education disaster in Austria: 29% of adults cannot read!

Education disaster in Austria: 29% of adults cannot read!

An alarming increase in reading and arithmetic skills in adults in Austria has become obvious through the results of the current OECD study, the programs for the international assessment of adult competecies (Piaac). Between 2012 and 2023, the group of 16- to 65-year-olds who have problems with reading almost doubled and now reaches 29 percent. These findings were presented by the OECD education director Andreas Schleicher during an online press conference, emphasizing that the achievements in Austria are in international comparison below the OECD average, which underlines urgency to reform the education system. For many adult participants, reading of simple texts is a challenge - they fail to master tasks that a primary schoolchildren themselves, as krone.at reported.

an overview of the Piaac study

The Piaac study represents the core of the investigation, which was carried out in 31 countries and aims to evaluate adult skills in everyday life and work. In Austria, around 5,000 adults were tested in 2022 and 2023 who did not attend any formal educational institutions. The study took a wide variety of factors such as education, professional status and socio-emotional skills. A remarkable innovation was the use of tablets instead of paper and pencil, which modernized the test conditions. The results of the study could provide important information on the educational and labor market policy to initiate targeted reforms, such as

Despite stable results in the math area, the study also showed a growing discrepancy between the abilities of adults and expectations. While Austria is over the OECD average of 263 points with 267 points in the mathematics test, more than 25 percent of the test results are limited to the lowest competence level of 1. This illustrates the urgency to support and promote educational reforms in order to combat the drop in performance in people without secondary levels.