Successful education systems are able to guarantee that all students succeed at high levels. Across OECD countries …, around 60% of the overall, country-level variation in student performance can be traced to differences in how well students …

of parents who consider academic achievement very important score 46 points higher in mathematics than the children of …When choosing a school for their child, parents in all participating countries value academic achievement highly; but … they are often even more concerned about the safety and environment of the school and the school’s reputation. The children …

Immigrant students often have to overcome multiple barriers at once in order to succeed at school. Across most OECD … countries, poor performance among immigrant students relative to other students is strongly related to social disadvantage at … school, as reflected in the proportion of students whose mothers have low levels of education. The concentration, in a school …

Most students enjoy orderly classrooms for their language-of-instruction lessons. Socio-economically disadvantaged … students are less likely to enjoy orderly classrooms than advantaged students. Orderly classrooms – regardless of the school …

Most students think that what they learned in school is useful for them or their future. Students’ attitudes towards … school are associated with their reading skills. Students who report that the climate at their school is conducive to …

learning. Teachers tend to give girls and socio-economically advantaged students better school marks, even if they don’t have … better performance and attitudes than boys and socio-economically disadvantaged students. It seems that marks not only … measure students’ progress in school, they also indicate the skills, behaviours, habits and attitudes that are valued in …

Children spend about a third of their waking hours in school during most weeks in the year. Thus, schools have a … significant impact on children’s quality of life – including their relationships with peers and adults, and their dispositions … towards learning and life more generally. Longitudinal studies suggest that students’ results on the PISA test are correlated …

On average across OECD countries, students who are highly motivated to learn mathematics because they believe it will … help them later on score better in mathematics – by the equivalent of half a year of schooling – than students who are not … highly motivated. Students’ motivation to learn mathematics is lower in education systems that sort and group students into …

The percentage of students who expect to complete university is highest in Korea (80%) and lowest in Latvia (25%). Many … high-performing students do not expect to go to university, representing potentially lost talent to an economy and society … while many low-performing students think they will make it to university, even if their current performance suggests they …

While most 15-year-old students spend part of their after-school time doing homework, the amount of time they spend on … it shrank between 2003 and 2012. Socio-economically advantaged students and students who attend socio … performance among students and schools, other factors are more important in determining the performance of school systems as a …