PISA Results Are Worrying. Perhaps We Need to Start Supporting Children Earlier.
There are some numbers in the latest PISA results that are difficult to ignore.
Every three years, there is an assessment of the reading, mathematics and science skills of 15-year-old students in 81 participating countries — representing approximately 42% of the world's population — providing a broad comparison of how well education systems are preparing young people for life and further learning.
The assessment is known as PISA, which stands for the Programme for International Student Assessment. It is an international study organised by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The OECD's 2025 PISA results, published in September 2026, show that average performance across OECD countries has fallen to its lowest recorded level in both reading and mathematics. Between 2015 and 2025, the average reading score fell by 28 points and mathematics by 22 points — equivalent, according to the OECD, to roughly a year or more of learning. One in five 15-year-olds across the OECD is now a low performer in reading, mathematics and science.
These are worrying figures.
But perhaps the most interesting question isn't simply "What teaching methods are failing teenagers?"
Perhaps we should be asking:
What could we have done differently before formal education became so demanding?
At Les Puces, this is a question we have been asking for many years.
What is a "language acceptance method"?
We describe Les Puces as a language acceptance method.
That phrase is important to us.
We have seen children arrive at primary and secondary school feeling anxious about learning a language. Sometimes they dislike the subject before they have really had the opportunity to discover it. Why?
Because it is unfamiliar.
They may never have encountered the language before. They may be worried about getting the pronunciation wrong. They may not understand why a word is pronounced in a particular way. They may find remembering vocabulary difficult. And, perhaps most importantly, they may already have decided that they are simply "not good at languages".
Yet there is nothing inevitable about this.
We wouldn't expect a child to become frightened of books because they hadn't yet learned to read at five. We wouldn't expect them to dislike music because they couldn't immediately read musical notation.
So why should another language feel like a frightening academic subject when a child first encounters it?
At Les Puces, we believe it shouldn't.
The years when children are listening
The early years are an extraordinary period for language.
Long before children can explain grammar, they are listening to the sounds, rhythms and patterns of language around them. They notice accents. They notice repetition. They notice the difference between a question and a statement. They learn that particular sounds belong together and that certain words tend to appear in particular situations.
And yet, traditionally, we often wait until much later to tell children:
"Now you are going to learn another language."
By then, language can have become an academic subject rather than something naturally encountered.
We believe there is another way.
Let children encounter French while they are still discovering what language itself can do.
Let them hear it.
Let them sing it.
Let them move to it.
Let them laugh at it.
Let them hear the same story again and again.
Let them make something connected to the vocabulary they have learned.
Let them recognise a French word months later and experience that wonderful little moment of:
"I know that!"
That is language acceptance.
The aim isn't to make a five-year-old sit down and conjugate French verbs.
The aim is to make another language familiar.
Perhaps this matters beyond languages
This is where the PISA results become particularly interesting.
The latest results aren't simply telling us that children are struggling to remember facts. The OECD has identified significant concerns around reading, including declines in skills connected with evaluating evidence and distinguishing fact from opinion — abilities that are closely related to critical thinking.
Critical thinking doesn't appear magically at fifteen.
It is built from habits developed over years.
Children need opportunities to listen carefully, notice differences, question what they encounter, make connections, hold ideas in their minds, change perspective and work things out.
And learning another language can provide an unusually rich environment for practising many of these things.
When a child encounters a sentence in French, they cannot always translate every word individually. They have to listen for clues.
What does that word mean in this context?
Have I heard that sound before?
Does the picture give me a clue?
What might happen next in the story?
Is this phrase being repeated?
Does the French expression work in exactly the same way as it does in English?
Why has the speaker used that particular word?
They are constantly observing, comparing, predicting and interpreting.
These are not exclusively language-learning skills. They are habits of thinking.
Research into bilingualism and executive function has explored possible advantages in areas such as cognitive switching, although the overall evidence is mixed and researchers rightly caution against making sweeping claims about a universal "bilingual advantage".
That distinction matters.
We don't teach French because we promise that it will magically make a child cleverer.
We teach French because learning another language is an excellent opportunity to make children think differently.
And we think that is valuable in its own right.
The four ways we learn
This is also why the Les Puces approach doesn't rely on one way of learning.
Every Les Puces module brings together four complementary approaches:
Rote learning — repeating and remembering vocabulary.
Rhyme and music — learning through songs and rhythm.
Storytelling — hearing a story repeatedly and becoming familiar with its structure.
Practical projects — putting the language into action by making and doing.
This might sound simple.
And it is.
But the important thing is that the same language is reinforced through all four approaches.
Imagine a child learning vocabulary for family members.
They might first hear and repeat the words.
Then they sing them.
They encounter them again in a story.
They see pictures connected to the vocabulary.
They complete activities in their workbook.
Finally, they make something themselves — putting the language they have been learning into practise through a practical project such as a "tree of love".
The child who naturally responds best to music isn't left with only the song.
The child who loves stories isn't dependent only on the story.
The child who learns best by doing isn't expected to remember everything from a worksheet.
The same language keeps coming back, from a different direction each time.
And gradually, it becomes familiar.
Learning without translating every word
Another important part of the Les Puces approach is what we call our "translation in head" method.
Imagine a child hearing a story in French for the first time.
If the story is completely unfamiliar, the child has two jobs: understand what is happening and understand the language.
That's hard.
But if the child already knows the story in their own language, the situation changes.
They know the characters.
They know the sequence.
They know roughly what is going to happen.
They understand the context.
So when they hear the story in French, they can concentrate on the language itself.
They can listen for the words they recognise.
They can notice repeated phrases.
They can begin to work out meaning from context.
In other words, we aren't simply asking a child to memorise a list of translations.
We are giving them a framework in which they can think their way towards meaning.
That is a very different experience.
The importance of the ear
There is another reason we believe starting early matters.
A young child's relationship with sound changes as they grow.
Mandie witnessed children pronouncing the final "z" in le nez, even though the teacher was saying the word correctly.
Why?
Because the children were increasingly influenced by what they could see written down.
This matters enormously when we teach languages.
If a child sees a word before they have properly established what it sounds like, the written form can interfere with the sound they are trying to reproduce.
That is why Les Puces uses pictures extensively when introducing vocabulary.
Children can look at the picture while listening to excellent French or English speakers.
They hear the word.
They repeat it.
They sing it.
They encounter it in a story.
They use it while making something.
The written word can come later.
We want the child's first experience of a new word to be the sound, not a spelling that they instinctively try to pronounce according to the rules of their first language.
Giving children something to recognise later
Perhaps this is the most important part of the whole idea.
A child who encounters French from an early age doesn't necessarily arrive at secondary school speaking fluent French.
That isn't the point.
They may arrive with something more valuable at that particular stage:
recognition.
A familiar sound.
A familiar word.
A song they remember.
A phrase from a story.
A piece of vocabulary that suddenly appears in their first formal French lesson.
And then comes the lightbulb moment.
"I've heard that before."
Instead of every part of the language being new, some pieces are already waiting for them.
The formal teaching can then begin to put those pieces together.
Grammar makes more sense because the child has already heard the patterns.
Vocabulary is easier to remember because some of it is familiar.
Listening feels less intimidating because the sound of the language is not new.
And perhaps most importantly, the child doesn't approach French thinking:
"I can't do this."
They approach it thinking:
"I know some of this already."
So what does this have to do with PISA?
We don't pretend that early French lessons are an answer to the world's educational problems.
They aren't.
The PISA results are complex. Children's educational outcomes are influenced by teaching quality, family circumstances, socioeconomic factors, motivation, reading habits, technology, school environments and many other things.
The OECD itself stresses the importance of strong foundations, effective teaching and purposeful use of technology rather than allowing digital tools to replace the thinking that children need to do themselves.
But perhaps the results should encourage us to think more broadly about what we give children before they reach the age at which everything becomes an examination.
Do we give them opportunities to listen?
To remember?
To question?
To compare?
To solve problems?
To see things from another perspective?
To persevere when they don't immediately understand?
To discover that there can be more than one way of expressing an idea?
To enjoy learning for the sake of learning?
These are not luxuries.
They are foundations.
And language is one particularly beautiful way of developing them.
Start before they are worried about getting it right
At Les Puces, we don't want a child's first experience of another language to be a test.
We want it to be a song.
A story.
A game.
A picture.
A conversation.
A piece of vocabulary that makes them laugh.
A project they proudly take home.
We want French to become something they know, before it becomes something they have to prove.
Because perhaps that is one of the lessons we can take from the worrying PISA results.
If we wait until children are older to introduce them to unfamiliar sounds, new ways of thinking and the experience of learning something completely new, we shouldn't be surprised when some of them feel anxious about getting things wrong.
But if we introduce children to those things early — gently, playfully and repeatedly — we can give them time to become comfortable with being learners.
And perhaps that is what language acceptance is really about.
Not teaching children to speak French before they are ready.
Making sure they are ready to learn it when the time comes.
Because the goal isn't simply to give children a head start in French.
It is to help them become children who are curious about language, comfortable with difference, willing to listen, prepared to work things out and unafraid of not understanding something immediately.
And those are qualities worth carrying far beyond the French classroom.
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