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-economically advantaged schools tend to spend more time doing homework....

Fewer 15-year-olds in East Asian countries reported that they use memorisation than did 15‑year‑olds in some of the English-speaking countries to whom they are often compared. In no PISA-participating education system did boys report more intensive use of memorisation than girls when...

Some 65% of socio-economically advantaged students reported that they know well or have often heard of the concept of quadratic function, on average across OECD countries; but only 43% of disadvantaged students so reported. On average across OECD countries, the 20% of students who are most...

This Public Procurement Brief presents two new EU public procurement Directives (2014/24/EU and 2014/25/EU) on procurement by public and utilities sectors. The Directives are part of a recently adopted EU legislative package reforming the EU public procurement rules. The Brief provides an...

The public procurement Directives only apply if a body is a contracting authority (contracting entity in the Utilities sector) within the definition of the Directives. SIGMA Brief 3 gives guidance on the notion of a contracting authority/entity under the directives (especially the concept of...

In most school systems, over 50% of 15-year-olds students attend schools that compete with another school to attract students from the same residential area. Across countries and economies, performance is unrelated to whether or not schools have to compete for students. When choosing a school...

Public authorities are major consumers in Europe: they spend approximately 2 trillion euros annually. By using their purchasing power to choose goods and services with lower impacts on the environment, they can make an important contribution to sustainable consumption and production....

SIGMA Brief 29 gives a short overview of the issue of common errors in public procurement. For the purposes of the Brief, errors are understood as infringements of public procurement rules and principles, regardless of the stage of the procedure. The Brief analyses the types of errors and their...

Regardless of the type of school attended (public or private, advantaged or disadvantaged), 15-year-old students spent more time in mathematics lessons in 2012 than in 2003. The average amount of time spent in mathematics classes varies by more than a factor of two across countries and...