On Tuesday 8 September 2026, the Association of Secondary and Higher Education Teachers of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg (Association des Professeurs de l’Enseignement Secondaire et Supérieur du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg - APESS) issued a response following the publication of the results of the international PISA 2025 study.
The study, published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on Tuesday 8 September, focused primarily on natural sciences and revealed a decline in the skills of fifteen-year-old students, particularly across Europe. According to Luxembourg's Ministry of Education, Children and Youth, the Grand Duchy recorded declines in mathematics and reading, while science remained about the same as in 2018.
In response, Gilles Everling, President of APESS, issued a press release in which he stated the results are “a shock for Luxembourg that has been a long time coming” and noted that the country’s students are “falling increasingly far below the OECD average in basic skills, particularly in reading and mathematics”.
Gilles Everling remarked that the reaction from Luxembourg Minister for Education Claude Meisch to tighten smartphone restrictions in schools “falls far short of addressing the issue”.
“Banning smartphones during breaks is right, but it is merely treating the symptoms if the Ministry is simultaneously flooding classrooms with iPads and increasingly turning learning into a purely virtual process,” explains Gilles Everling, President of APESS. “Anyone who replaces books with screens, outsources mathematics to software and downgrades the subject expert to a ‘learning facilitator’ should not be surprised when students lose the ability to understand a long text and think abstractly,” stressed Gilles Everling.
APESS warned against the “illusion of the current reform policy”, which it is said is dismantling subject knowledge in favour of “so-called ‘21st century skills’ and digital competency-based education”.
The association emphasised: “PISA 2025 proves it: transversal skills without subject depth are empty. Critical thinking and problem-solving are not learned through a screen, but through cognitive effort, handwriting, real books, as well as human resistance and oral assessment by a qualified A1 subject expert.”
APESS announced it will present its comprehensive audit for School 2046 (Report #3: “The Human Premium”) in the coming weeks. According to APESS, the audit calls for “a paradigm shift in order to safeguard our children’s cognitive sovereignty and basic skills”.
