Many countries are struggling to reconcile greater flexibility in school choice with the need to ensure quality, equity and coherence in their school systems. This report provides an international perspective on issues related to school choice, especially how certain aspects of school-choice...

Countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia have clear aspirations to strengthen civic participation and increase prosperity for all. A highly skilled and knowledgeable population is critical to achieving these goals, which makes creating and maintaining high quality and equitable education...

This report explores the educational performance and attitudes of males and females during childhood and adolescence. It opens with a general summary of gender differences measured outside of the PISA assessment programme and then considers the knowledge gained about gender-related issues from...

This volume of PISA 2009 results examines how human, financial and material resources, and education policies and practices shape learning outcomes. Following an introduction to PISA and a Reader's Guide explaining how to interpret the data, Chapter 1 presents a summary of features shared by...

In OECD countries, the average class size at the lower secondary level is 23 students, but there are significant differences between countries, ranging from over 32 in Japan and Korea to 19 or below in Estonia, Iceland, Luxembourg, Slovenia and the United Kingdom. Class size, together with...

In most countries and economies, students who attend schools in urban areas tend to perform at higher levels than other students. Socio-economic status explains only part of the performance difference between students who attend urban schools and other students. Schools in urban settings are...

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’s overall socio-economic profile – are related to...

How much choice should parents and pupils have over which school to attend? This question has been at the centre of some of the recent educational policy debates about the role of consumer preferences. In some OECD countries, rules allocating public school places according to residence have been...