At the Nordic STEM Summit 2025, we were privileged to hear directly from Kristina Kallas, the Estonian Minister of Education and Science, as she revealed the key factors behind Estonia’s remarkable achievements in STEM education and their outstanding performance on the PISA assessment.
Watch the interview with Kristina Kallas
Strong PISA performance is widely seen as a predictor of economic success, signaling how effectively education systems prepare students for the global knowledge economy of the 21st century (PISA Scores by Country 2025).
During her presentation on Estonia’s education system and its impressive PISA results, Minister Kallas outlined the country’s strategies and shared insights into the historical foundations that shaped its approach to learning.
Estonian education approaches: insights on their PISA success
- It is important that teachers have great autonomy in deciding what must be taught and how. A prerequisite for high autonomy is teacher qualifications.
- Estonia does not segregate children based on ability levels in early childhood but instead focus on general equity.
- In Estonia, they focus on children’s social emotional skills and self-regulatory skills early on, in kindergarten and preschool, which they believe is fundamental.
- There is an overall mentality in the education system and in the society’s expectations toward the education system, summarised as “Aim high and work hard”.
Watch the full presentation here
PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) is a global assessment of 15-year-old students’ critical thinking in math, science, and reading, conducted by OECD every three years, across 65+ countries representing 90% of the world’s economies. Around 600,000 students take a two-hour test designed to measure real-world problem-solving skills, rather than memorisation.