Name: Which country has the best education in the world? - The Global Story podcast, BBC World Service
Uploaded: 2025-04-29T15:20:48.000Z
Duration: 22 min 13 s
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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 Cochran.

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.

Also joining us today is John Gerram, 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.

So we want to talk about which country has the best education system in the world, if we can say that.

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 tests taken by children at the age of 15 in a number of countries around the world, not all the countries, but 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.

When they were introduced, first of all, that was a very contentious idea, because people said, how can you possibly compare big countries?

How can you compare America to Luxembourg or to parts of China or whatever?

And people would say they're very different systems, different cultures, different levels of income.

But the people who introduced these tests weren't from education.

It was the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation 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.

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 piece of tests?

So the ones that perform consistently well over time and across the different studies are the East Asian countries.

So typical examples include South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong.

There's some that do particularly well in Pisa.

On top of that, Finland was a hot topic for a long time, although its performance has declined recently.

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, are poorer countries.

You'll find 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.

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, Singapore or Estonia or Taiwan or those sort of places, which we don't historically think of as being economic rivals.

But I suppose the argument for the Pisa test 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 Yeah.

So as kind of 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.

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.

How well that worked or not, 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 become the headline.

Sean, some countries take these Pisa rankings incredibly seriously.

And how do they think that a better education system is going to affect even the economic outcomes of the country that 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, Germany, people talk about Pisa shock in Germany because they thought they were very good.

But there was also that complacency and they got the Pisa results first time around and realized, in fact, they're pretty awful.

And that turned into quite a political scandal.

Our schools aren't as good as we thought they were.

The other end of the spectrum, there are countries who see education as their way out, as some individuals always have in their lives.

In the 1960s, Singapore would have been one of the poorest countries in the world.

We're in 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 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 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.

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.

Why, Sean, does Singapore have something in common with Estonia?

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.

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 a different level of abilities, then you are segregating them.

And we don't want to segregate any people in the world.

Why we are doing that in the schools, that's my personal opinion.

This is one of the main things why Estonia is successful.

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

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