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Reuters
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The OECD has published the biggest ever
global school rankings with Asian countries coming in the top five, in the
first truly global survey of education standards.
Singapore
is in the lead again followed by Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
Finland,
well known for its high quality education, was the top European country coming
in sixth, while Sweden fell to 35th place, following warnings from the OECD
that it had serious problems in its education system. The US was well down in
28th place.
African
countries dominated the bottom rankings with South Africa and Ghana coming in
last.
In
the last similar study, the 2012 Pisa tests, Singapore was in second place with
China in first and Hong Kong third.
The
OECD's education director, Andreas Schleicher, said that many high performing
Asian countries are excellent at attracting the most talented teachers.
"If
you go to an Asian classroom you'll find teachers who expect every student to
succeed. There's a lot of rigor, a lot of focus and coherence," he said.
Unlike
the latest Pisa test in 2012, which looked at 65 mainly developed countries, the
2015 OECD rankings based their test score on 76 countries, as well as
attempting to show the link between education and economic growth.
"This
is the first time we have a truly global scale of the quality of education. The
idea is to give more countries, rich and poor, access to comparing themselves
against the world's education leaders, to discover their relative strengths and
weaknesses, and to see what the long-term economic gains from improved quality
in schooling could be for them," said Schleicher.
Unlike
the OECD’s 2012 Pisa tests, the 2015 test scores were based on knowledge of
maths and science among 15 year olds.
The
2015 rankings bring together a number of international assessments, including
the Pisa tests, which include reading as well as maths and science, the TIMSS
tests, run by US academics and the TERCE tests in Latin America.
The
results will be formally presented at the World Economic Forum in South Korea
next week, where the UN is holding a conference on raising global standards of education
by 2030.
The
conference will mark 15 years since world leaders set targets for education,
many of which, such as providing all children with primary education, have not
been achieved.
The
key writers of the report, Eric Hanushek from Stanford University and Ludger
Woessmann from Munich University, say that education is a very important factor
in the long term wealth of a country.
"Poor
education policies and practices leave many countries in what amounts to a
permanent state of economic recession," the report reads.
If Ghana, which came bottom
on the table, managed to achieve basic skills for its 15 year olds, it would
increase its current GDP 38 times.
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