Climate protesters march to the office of the minister for the environment and water, Tanya Plibersek, in Sydney last year. OECD’s Pisa program will measure the ability of students to take action in response to climate anxiety and ‘take their position and role in the global world’ More summer essentials Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast “It’s going to get hot and everything’s going to be on fire and the oceans will rise. That’s just like the worst of the worst. How do you combat that?” asks year 11 student, Josh Dorian. “Well, you fix it, you stop it from happening, you take preventive measures,” says Josh, who is studying VCE environmental science at Mount Lilydale Mercy College, a high school in Melbourne’s outer east. “Involving kids in that is scary, but I think it’s necessary.” In 2025, for the first time in nearly a decade, science will be the major focus of the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (Pisa) – which runs every three years (give or take Covid interruptions), with its focus rotating between reading, maths and science. This year it will measure the knowledge and ability of 15-year-old students from 92 countries and economies to act on climate change, under a new heading: Agency in the Anthropocene. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director of education, describes the refreshed science framework as a “small revolution”, addressing students’ capacity to distinguish scientific evidence from misinformation in the context of the “biggest challenge of our times – our environment”. “This is not about a few people who are going to be engineers or scientists in their later lives. This is the foundation we want to create for every student,” he says. Dr Goran Lazendic, who […]