Which country has the best education in the world? - The Global Story podcast, BBC World Service

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. 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.

It's cruel not to open schools for girls. We have as much right to learn as boys do. It would be cruel of the Taliban not to allow us to return to our schools.

So what does the best school system in the world look like, and which country educates its children the best? With me today in the Global Story studio is Sean Coughlan, 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.

Also joining us today is John Jerrim, who is a professor at the University of 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. Thanks a lot for inviting me. So we want to talk about what 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. Um, when they when they were introduced. First of all, that was a very contentious idea because people said, how can you possibly compare big countries?

How how can you compare America to Luxembourg or to, you know, or to parts of China or whatever? And people would say they're very different systems, different cultures, um, 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 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. And they approached education the 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 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 or 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 Pisa tests?

So the ones that perform consistently well over time and across those different studies are the East Asian countries. So typical examples include, uh, South Korea, 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. Um, Estonia is a country that does very well now in Pisa and Canada to some extent also.

And the countries that don't do so well, Sean? Well, they tend to be countries which I suppose our poorer countries, um, you find in, 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, and to an extent, the education systems within the UK 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, you know, Singapore or Estonia or, um, Taiwan or those sort of places which, which we don't historically think of as being economic rivals. But I suppose the argument for the Pisa tests is if you want to have a knowledge economy, an economy based on skills, 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 that, you know, 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, how hard they have to work, how stressed they are. Is that really part of a good, well rounded, holistic education?

Yeah. So as 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.

Um, how well that worked or not, uh, 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' wellbeing and how confident they are. So that does become part of it.

But it doesn't often kind of, um, 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 of the country that, you know, they're running? 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. I mean, in Germany, people talk about Pisa shock in Germany, because they thought they were very good, but there was also an element of complacency, and they got the Pisa results first time around and realised that in fact, they were pretty awful.

And that turned into quite a political scandal. 'Our scores 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.

John mentioned Singapore in the 1960s. Singapore would have been one of the poorest countries in the world, it would have been 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, uh, 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 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 and 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? Well, a long time ago, I remember trying to do an identikit picture of what a successful Pisa country would look like.

Um, 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 different level or abilities, then you are segregating them.

And and we don't want to segregate any people in the world. Why are we doing that in the schools? That's my personal opinion.

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.

Um, teachers were expected to make sure their pupils got there. But I think there are other cultural factors, possibly. It's interesting.

It was a very striking how many of the 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.

You know, Canada's 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, 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.

And I think that is the characteristic of a top Pisa 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. Um, I don't think there's any good international evidence on the best time that children start school. I don't think that it's clear-cut that it's better to start them earlier versus later, at least coming 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. In 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 a 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, you can make kind of up to three or four months extra learning gains over the course of an academic year, compared to if you have one of the kind of, um, lowest quality teachers or whatever in the class.

So it is a big, 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 both in wealth, in, uh, in geography and also, uh, fairness, I suppose, equity. If America was taken.

. . America's overall result, the United States result, is quite mediocre.

But if you take some of the individual states, like Massachusetts, had 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 talk about Mississippi before, and a few other southern states, do really badly. They would be, uh, not of the Western world if their results were put with other countries.

And so what you get up is an average and you get into another question. And 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.

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, in Sudan and Ukraine as well. Just take us through what the impact is on a child if they can't get access to education. Well, 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 without basic literacy skills, trying to navigate a digital world increasingly, no matter where you are, and that's kind of implications for your own wealth, your own family's wealth, um, 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 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 it's not just war, it's corruption. It's bad management. It's teachers not being paid.

Um, 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 and it was awful. And you think there still goes on and it shouldn't be the case. It should be something that 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. Um, if children, 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's cruel not to open schools for girls. We have as much right to learn as boys do. It would be cruel of the Taliban not to allow us to return to our schools.

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 another assessment called Pals which is ten-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 world, and it holds true over time. And we have data from England and the United States where children take very early kind of literacy and verbal tests, you know, age 3A5. 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, um, it's a lot more kind of even. In 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 has got a great culture of education, the country, as if it were some sort of act of God that that some countries do well and some other countries do badly. But I think the interesting thing about the Pisa tests is they actually show that things can change.

Things aren't inevitable. Um, some countries can show that children from very deprived backgrounds can do very well. And that raises the question, well, why can't that happen elsewhere?

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, putting it bluntly.

You know, teasing out, I think, as Sean said very nicely, the very specific factor 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.

Anecdotally, I live in a part of London which the schools are considered low decile, so there's a lot of kids 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 that 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, 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 think.

. . 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. 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 the 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. There may be, it suits 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. If you want more episodes of The Global Story, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts.

Each day we dive deep into a single story, bringing you in-depth analysis of world events. Don't forget to subscribe as well so you never miss an episode. Thanks so much for watching!

Goodbye.