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 tend to have more positive attitudes towards school.

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...

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 who attend the same school can be expected to perform....

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...

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...

The quantity and quality of resources available to schools improved significantly between 2003 and 2012, on average across OECD countries. Greater financial investments in education provided schools with better teaching staff, instructional materials and physical infrastructure. The learning...

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....

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...

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...

Across OECD countries, 18% of students skipped classes at least once in the two weeks prior to the PISA test, and 15% of students skipped a day of school or more over the same period. Few students in high-performing school systems skip classes or days of school. For students in OECD countries,...