Swiss schools appear to be succeeding at their most basic task. According to a nationwide assessment published by Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education, the overwhelming majority of children in the fourth year of HarmoS schooling—the equivalent of second grade in primary school—meet national standards in mathematics and language skills.
The survey, conducted in 2024 among 20,000 pupils, forms part of Switzerland’s long-running effort to harmonise education standards across its fiercely autonomous cantons. The results are reassuring. Some 87% of pupils reached the expected level in oral comprehension, while 79% did so in reading comprehension and 76% in mathematics.
Christophe Darbellay, president of the education ministers’ conference, told RTS that the findings vindicate years of reform. At school, the main thing is to read, write and count, he said.
Perhaps more importantly in a federal country often marked by regional disparities, the study found no major differences between cantons. Twenty years after Swiss voters approved a constitutional reform designed to coordinate education policy nationwide, the harmonisation effort appears broadly successful.
Yet the report also exposed differences. Gender makes little difference at this age: boys and girls perform similarly. Social background, however, matters enormously. Children from disadvantaged households perform markedly worse, especially when poverty coincides with migration and linguistic disadvantage.
The study found that pupils who combine several risk factors—lower social status, a migrant background and a foreign language spoken at home—reach national targets only around half the time, even in mathematics. By contrast, children from more advantaged backgrounds succeed in roughly 90% of cases.
The report notes that such factors rarely operate in isolation. Social, linguistic and migratory conditions tend to reinforce one another, producing cumulative disadvantages that schools struggle to offset.
The comparatively strong results among younger pupils also stand in sharp contrast to an earlier study published in 2025, which revealed worrying shortcomings at the end of compulsory schooling. In French-speaking Switzerland, only 41% of pupils in the final year met spelling targets, prompting several cantons to revive old-fashioned dictation exercises in an effort to restore standards.
The contrast suggests that Switzerland’s schools are reasonably effective at teaching basic skills in the early years. Their greater challenge may be maintaining performance as pupils grow older.
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