Which country educates its children best?
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Hello, I'm Lucy Hockings. From the BBC World Service, this is The Global Story. A good education can make us richer, healthier and help us to thrive.

And governments around the world compete in global rankings to see which nation is deemed to have the best school system in the world. Our main responsibility is to nurture the students in such a way that they will be ready for the future, to become productive citizens of tomorrow. Asian schools often get the best results, with some Nordic countries also highly praised. But in many parts of the world, there are often huge barriers to getting children into the classroom at all.

So what does the best school system in the world look like? And which country educates its children best?

With me today in the Global Story studio is Sean Cochran. Some of you will have heard Sean and I talking already on the Global Story about the UK royal family as he's one of our royal correspondents. But before that, Sean, for many years you were one of our education correspondents and you led BBC News coverage of what we're going to talk about today, which is global education. So welcome. Thank you. Good to see you again. And also joining us today is John Jerram, who's a professor at University College London's Institute of Education.

And John has dug deep into the global data about different education systems around the world and is here to reveal all. Hi, John. Hi. So we're going to talk about education, but we thought perhaps a good place to start is about how it's shaped our lives.

How do you feel, Sean, education influenced your start in life and where you've ended up? I think it's absolutely crucial, really. And also, because I'm an old man, I've seen education change a lot. I came through a system in England called the grammar school system, which meant that you all took an exam when you were 11, and people who did well went on to college.

academically selective schools for grammar schools and those who didn't, didn't. And I think those sort of divisions shape lots of lives. And for me, it has meant I went to a very academic school, I went on to university. And I suppose that route ultimately comes here through some twists and turns. But I think it is. I think it's a big shaping influence in where people end up

And access to and lack of access to good education is pivotal to lots of lives, not just your own personal life, but also economically as well, I think, how you end up

coping with the demands of jobs and money. How about for you, John? It's had a really big impact on my life. So neither of my parents went to university. They both left school at age 14 or 15, whereas I myself was motivated very much to kind of go through education, go through all the way through university, all the way through to PhD.

I've often kind of felt when doing that, you know, I need to get a good education because that's going to be my route to getting a good job and to be able to kind of afford things as I'm growing up as an adult. And, you know, for me, it's worked. You know, I've been able to kind of go and get a good job at a good university through education. So it's had a massive role in my life. So we want to talk about which country has the best education system in the world, if we can say that. But

What evidence are there? What measures are there, Sean, to judge that? Well, I suppose the most commonly used measure would be what's known as the PISA tests. And these are tests taken by children at the age of 15 in a number of countries around the world. Not all the countries, about 80 in the last round. And since the year 2000,

results have been published ranking education systems in terms of their level of achievement. And the tests are in key areas of reading, maths and science. When they were introduced, first of all, that was a very contentious idea because people said, how can you possibly compare big countries? How can you compare America to Luxembourg or to parts of China or whatever? And people would say they're very different systems, different cultures, different levels of income.

But the people who introduced these tests weren't from education. They were from an economics background. It was the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And they approached education in a way they might look at GDP or look at measuring inflation. And it was a very different way of looking at it. And they got people to take these tests, often against a great deal of local resistance, and then compared them. And they have produced results.

for the last couple of decades, this huge amount of data that allows people in one country to look at how they compare to others. And I suppose their big finding often is that what we think of as being

our education system isn't inevitable. You can do well, you can do badly. Some people do better at different things. Girls and boys might do differently, different groups. And I think this has just cast a big light by not letting education systems just look internally, but also to look at other comparisons. So John, which countries do do well in these piece of tests? So the ones that perform consistently well over time and across those different studies are the East Asian countries.

So typical examples include South Korea. The library where I study near my house, it only opens until 10. So if I want to study more and like finish up my work, then I just come back to school. Singapore, Hong Kong, they always consistently do well. There's some that do particularly well in Pisa on top of that. Finland was, you know, a hot topic for a long time, although its performance has declined recently. Estonia is a country that does very well now in Pisa and Canada to some extent also. Yeah.

How important do you think education is to your children's future? Very important. Very important. It's also important to do it in a way that they enjoy it, but not forcing them to do something, but do it in a wise way. And the countries that don't do so well, Sean? Well, they tend to be countries which, I suppose, are poorer countries. You'll find in terms of countries that participate, maybe in parts of South America, Central America, some of the Arab world too, countries in sub-Saharan Africa don't take part.

and quite a lot of Asian countries don't take part either. So it's a partial test. But perhaps what's interesting about doing badly is that often big European countries, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, aren't that brilliant really. And as John suggested, the interesting bit is they have a lot of history, a lot of money, a lot of development behind them, but they're being outpaced and outperformed by these fast upcoming countries, Singapore or Estonia or Europe.

Taiwan or those sort of places which we don't historically think of as being economic rivals but I suppose the argument for the PISA test is if you want to have a knowledge economy an economy based on skills this

this is how you measure it. And those other countries are outpacing us at the moment. So I think that's the interesting comparison. That raises the issue, though, and I've done interviews around PISA and these tests for years, about what a good education actually is, John, because there'll be those that say, how do you measure that? How do you actually define what a good education is when you think about some of these East Asian countries and what the students go through? As a mother, I think it's painful to see him this way.

I mean, learning is about enjoying. I mean, you're supposed to enjoy what you learn to have fun and not getting stressed or depressed. How hard they have to work, how stressed they are. Is that really part of a good, well-rounded, holistic education? Yeah. So as kind of Sean was saying, they've really focused on the academic side in their kind of history, maths, reading and science.

But you're right, kind of a good education is a much broader thing. And we as parents or whatever kind of want a lot more for our children than just to be good at those academic kind of side of things. And in fairness, the OECD in recent years have tried to move the dial a little bit and measure more of these kind of softer skills. So in the latest round of PISA, they tried to introduce a creativity test.

How well that worked or not, I think, is open to debate, but they are kind of live to that issue. And as part of PISA, they do kind of conduct this big questionnaire exercise as well, where they capture things like kids' well-being and how confident they are. So that does become part of it, but it doesn't often kind of become the headline. Sean, some countries...

take these PISA rankings incredibly seriously. Why? And how do they think that a better education system is going to affect even the economic outcomes? Well, I suppose there are two ends of that scale. The countries who might think they're doing well and then get a bit of a shock. In Germany, people talk about PISA shock in Germany because they thought they were a very good country.

But there was also an element of complacency. And they got the PISA results first time round and realized, in fact, they were pretty awful. And that turned into quite a political scandal. Our schools aren't as good as we thought they were. What are we going to do with ourselves? The other end of the spectrum, there are countries who see education as their way out, as some individuals always have in their lives. And John mentioned Singapore. In the 1960s, Singapore would have been one of the poorest countries in the world. We're in a country with...

very low levels of literacy and it deliberately invested in education to make itself a high skills

high-income country. Our main responsibility is to nurture the students in such a way that they will be ready for the future, to become productive citizens of tomorrow. And we all know that the future is going to become more complex, much more uncertain, much more unpredictable, much more ambiguous. I suppose it's back to the idea that economists might say, if you want to see the economy of the future, look at the classrooms of today. And it's a massive economic driver. And if you look at the sort of jobs which

which now are in demand and the jobs which are well paid, and where economies want to place themselves in the economic food chain. Education and education skills, more broadly, are absolutely central to that. And that's a long-term game. But countries which have chosen to invest in education skills, who consciously decided to make this a priority, will see the economic reward. So let's look then at what works, because we've looked at which countries are considered to have successful education systems. But I think we all want to know why.

Why, Sean, does Singapore have something in common with Estonia? I mean, does it, these high-achieving countries? What do they have in common? A long time ago, I remember trying to do an identikit picture of what a successful PISA country would look like. And there are sort of philosophical questions about equality, countries which make sure that all their pupils get through a certain level of education to a certain standard, regardless of their background, do well. If you are teaching them by a different level of abilities...

then you are segregating them. And we don't want to segregate any people in the world. Why we are doing that in the schools, this is one of the main things why Estonia is successful. Shanghai used to be the model that was talked about a great deal because there was an assumption there that no matter if children came from a very deprived background, they would still get to a certain level of education. And their education system was based around that. Teachers were expected to make sure their pupils got there.

But I think there are other cultural factors possibly. It's interesting, it was very striking how many of top PISA performers are small and fairly new nation states, younger states, ambitious, wanting to define themselves.

Often countries which live near very big neighbours. Estonia is near Russia. Canada is near the USA. Singapore has lots of bigger geographical neighbours around it too. Or Taiwan is near to China. The superstars at Pisa are often small countries

quite cohesive countries who have set themselves a target of getting better, often places without any great natural resource. They don't have oil, they don't have big populations, they have to focus on something like this. I think that is the characteristic of a top piece of star. John, what about the age in which children start school? I remember sending my summer-born little four-year-old off to school in his uniform and thinking how tiny he was.

and that if he was in Finland, it would be another three years before he started school. I also have a summer-born four-year-old who's just started school, so that's a very kind of poignant question to me. I don't think there's any good international evidence on the best time that children start school. I don't think there's a clear cut that it's better to start them earlier versus later, at least kind of from the international kind of assessment data.

What I would say is, you know, there is a bit of a blurred line between school and earlier education as well. So there's often a fixation on, you know, we start school at this age. But I know I sent my four-year-old to nursery beforehand and he was definitely doing some education stuff in the year beforehand. Countries where children don't formally start school until age seven, it's not that they're not doing anything beforehand, right, a lot of them.

A lot of them will be kind of doing different types of earlier types of education. It's taken us this long to get to one of the most important things that happens in the classroom, and that is the actual teaching and the teacher, John. How much does teacher quality or the funding of teachers play a role in these countries that do well?

Yeah, well, we know from the international evidence, teacher quality matters. It matters a lot. You know, if you are fortunate enough to have a very good teacher, to make kind of up to three, four months extra learning gains over the course of an academic year, compared to if you have one of the kind of lowest quality teachers or whatever in the class. So it is a big driving factor. How much it explains international differences, you can't

quite put a figure on. I have a feeling that it's part of the mix that goes into why some of these countries do better than worse, but it's probably not the major component for a lot of them. So I think it plays some role, but not kind of like the key ingredient by itself, as it were. Sean, when we've been talking about the PISA rankings, you haven't actually mentioned the UK and the US, I don't think.

But some of our listeners in those two countries that are listening will probably be surprised to see how far down the rankings, the UK and the US are. Why is that? Well, I think in the case of the United States, the big issue there is the massive divide between

both in wealth, in geography, and also fairness, I suppose, equity. America's overall result, the United States' result, is quite mediocre. But if you take some of the individual states, like Massachusetts, if it entered on its own as a separate country, would do incredibly well, be right at the top.

Some of the southern states, I think I remember people talking about Mississippi before and a few other southern states do really badly. They would be not of the Western world if their results were put with other countries. So what you get up is an average. And you get into another question. So the average is rather middling is the overall result.

You also get into that sort of bigger question then about fairness overall, because America has lots of elite universities, has lots of elite schools too. They might say their system works, the money, the funding, everything goes into an elite system, but doesn't serve very many people who are struggling in other schools. And I suppose that's the sort of question that's highlighted by the international comparison.

So we've looked at which countries in the world have the best education systems and why. Now I want to look at the challenges and barriers to education around the world. How poverty and war stop countries from prioritising young people's education.

I'm Crassi Twig, and on the documentary we zoom in on the backstory of the Syrian militant group that led a coalition of rebels to take control of Aleppo. Once an offshoot of al-Qaeda, HDS rebranded itself in its desire to be seen as a credible governing body. To listen to this episode of The Global Jigsaw, where we look at the world through the lens of its media, search for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

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I'm Lucy Hockings. You're listening to the Global Story podcast from the BBC World Service. Follow or subscribe wherever you listen. I'm here with Sean Cochlan and John Jerram.

The UN estimates that 224 million children need educational support, and that includes more than 72 million who can't attend school at all because of war or conflict in their country. There are also other barriers too, such as living a very long distance from school, what's happening with our climate and poverty.

Sean, if we look at war, it's obviously a massive factor that can stop children attending school. And we can see this happening in Gaza at the moment and Sudan and Ukraine as well. Just take us through what the impact is on a child if they can't get access to education. I always think this is a scandal that it's not even a bigger scandal because, as you're saying, tens of millions of children never even get to go to any kind of education. And it's not just about learning to read and write.

It's what happens beyond that point. You know, if you imagine trying to navigate a modern world with basic literacy skills, trying to navigate a digital world increasingly, no matter where you are, and that's kind of implications for your

your own wealth, your own family's wealth, also your health, your chances of being caught up in conflicts, being influenced by extremism and all kinds of bad things, criminality, all those are linked to a lack of education. And I think it's a pernicious thing that we've allowed. It's extraordinary, here we are in 2024, and there are still tens of millions of children who don't even get to start education. And there's

It's not just war, it's corruption, it's bad management, it's teachers not being paid. I remember going to schools in Africa where there were empty classrooms and you'd say, well, why isn't anyone going to school? Teachers weren't getting paid, they got other jobs as taxi drivers and it was awful. And you think that still goes on and it shouldn't be the case. It should be something we're reading about in history books. And also particularly there's been a lot of work on

girls missing out on education has an impact on their families as well. If girls leave school early to get married too young, perhaps, they condemn their own families to poverty. You don't learn the skills you need, you don't get the chances you need. It's the most extraordinary unfairness, and it's odd that we're allowing it to happen even now.

I have to fetch water from the trading centre and bring it to the mining site so that we can pan for gold. I want to go back to school.

And Sean, I think we should take a moment to address what's happening in Afghanistan. There is still this massive global education campaign to let girls learn. But when the Taliban took over, it's become the only country in the world that does not allow girls and women to attend schools and universities. So if you're over 12 and you're a girl in Afghanistan, you can't go to school.

It is a truly terrible thing.

I remember interviewing women who had been at school during previous Taliban regime. But when I say going to school, they had to go secretly to school under great fear. And there were secret schools arranged where they tried to do some learning. They tried to teach each other. They tried to get smuggled books. I remember also they talked about listening to the World Service because it gave them a chance to

hear other settings and hear English being spoken as well as their own language. And what's awful is that that was, I've been writing about that as a terrible dark page that had been turned. And here we are again, you know, back in the same situation again,

And the sense of control that comes with that by denying someone education, you deny someone their right to themselves, to think for themselves, their ability to act independently, to have the qualifications they need to get jobs and to be independent properly in a society. So it's an appalling thing, I think, and I think we should never accept as being normal education.

John, we've been reflecting on how difficult it is for girls and young women in some countries to access education. They're even denied it in Afghanistan. And there's clear discrimination that obviously takes place in some countries. But in terms of OECD countries, isn't it the case that girls are outperforming boys? That's certainly true in some specific subjects. So the clearest example is reading. So there's the PISA assessment of 15-year-olds in reading, and there's an

another assessment called pals which is 10 year olds reading and in both of those you do very clearly see a gender gap where girls always outperform boys it holds true across pretty much every country in the wilderness holds true over time and we have data from england the united states where children take very early kind of literacy and verbal tests you know age three eight five and you can see even very early on in kind of um

children's lives. So it's very clear in terms of reading. In terms of other subjects, it's a bit more nuanced. So mathematics, it's a lot more kind of even if some countries there's definitely kind of still an advantage to boys. So it does vary across the different subjects. And Sean, how much do you think an education system can actually change? Are other countries looking at Singapore or Estonia or some of these high performing countries and saying,

We need to be more like this. And then they can make it happen. I think they can change. I think you often get into that thing about people say, oh, so-and-so's got a great culture of education, a country as if it was some sort of act of God that some countries did well and some other countries did badly.

I think the interesting thing about the PISA test is they actually show that things can change. Things aren't inevitable. Some countries can show that children from very deprived backgrounds can do very well. And that raises the question, why can't that happen elsewhere? Information allows you to see what works. Finland was once hailed as being the great superstar of education. And we all had to troop off to see what worked in Finland. And I remember talking to a Finnish education minister who had a very complicated situation.

curriculum-based theory for why they thought that Finland did so well in school tests and why its education system was so high-performing. But I was struck by the fact that when I was there,

Every kid who went to school in Finland of any age got free food. It was really good, healthy, nutritious food. People came in on days off, hung around there because they got a really nice dinner. And I thought they probably couldn't see how different that was from the perspective of the UK or from England. The last round of PISA tests showed that England has one of the biggest problems of the world for food insecurity for children, children with disabilities.

We know about the spread of food banks. Many, many schools in England now have food banks. It's hard to learn and pay attention if you're hungry. And John, what about the way that kids are taught? Is there a magic formula there now that we know that works? No. Is the short answer there, bluntly? You know, teasing out, I think as Sean said very nicely, the very specific fact

that's driving these country-level differences is really, really tricky. So people will often want to point to a teaching method or a thing or a policy and try to export it from one country to another. It doesn't really work like that and it's not that simple.

So I think the best way to use these kind of data often is basically a question starter saying, hey, you know, these places are doing well. Let's go over there. Let's have a look. Let's have conversations and let's think up, hey, what might work within our context. So I really like Sean's example there of just the food.

actually, you know, that does make you reflect on what's going on in your own country. And actually, should our standards be better there in terms of just food in our country? And I think that's a quite neat way of using this data. Anecdotally, I live in a part of London which the schools are considered low decile. So there's a lot of kids from...

from poorer backgrounds in those schools and the schools were underperforming for years. Then the government came in and spent a lot of money in our borough on schools. And it might not come as any surprise, Sean, that it worked. Standards went up. Is there just not a fundamental here that in order for kids to get the best education, quite a lot of money needs to be spent? It does come down to money and resourcing. I think money is vital as a starting point, but it is also how you spend it. And

There is a basic level of funding. You need the right number of teachers, you need the right equipment, you need to be warm, you need to make sure the children are well fed and comfortable and able to learn and they're well supported in that sense. But then it's often, I suppose, you look to the evidence again. I remember for a while class size was the big thing.

let's cut down class sizes. The PISA test suggests that that has, beyond a certain point, not that much of an impact, really, because often some of the most successful countries in East Asia had huge classes, didn't seem to trouble them, and other factors must have been going on. So I think, yes, certainly, you can't shirk...

responsibility for funding schools properly, allowing people from all backgrounds to have a fair chance and support them. But I do think often what this raises is how much this is a choice. You can choose to spend on education or choose not to. You can choose by policy to ensure that people from no matter where their starting point is get a fair chance to catch up.

They might not catch up right all the way, but you can decide whether or not you're going to have an education system that is based around getting as many people as possible to do well.

Or historically, I think one of the weaknesses of the education system in England was that there's a great resistance to the idea that everyone could do well. If you had a test in our culture in Britain that said, here's a test and everyone's going to pass it, people would be outraged. They'd say this is a rubbishy test because it's not, you know, because we build our systems based on a sort of filtering, sorting mechanism system.

I know Shanghai was hailed for a while as being a great example and there they had a policy of expecting children, regardless of their background, regardless of their deprivation, of reaching a certain level of education.

The sort of education system you end up with isn't an act of nature. There's a series of things that maybe suit the people who run places. It might be how they like it. But I think they're not accidents. They are products of how we run our society and they can be changed. John, thank you so much for being with us. No, thank you. Enjoyed it. Sean, lovely to have you here. Pleasure.

Thanks so much to you for listening. If you have any questions, don't forget you can email us at theglobalstoryatbbc.com or send us a message or voice note on WhatsApp. Our number is plus44 330 123 9480. All of those details are also in our show notes. Wherever you're listening in the world, this has been The Global Story. Thanks for having us in your headphones. Goodbye. Goodbye.

I'm Crassi Twig, and on the documentary we zoom in on the backstory of the Syrian militant group that led a coalition of rebels to take control of Aleppo. Once an offshoot of Al-Qaeda, HDS rebranded itself in its desire to be seen as a credible governing body. To listen to this episode of The Global Jigsaw, where we look at the world through the lens of its media, search for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.