Asia Tops

Biggest Global School Rankings

Pisa (I), May 2015 - The biggest-ever global school rankings have been published, with Asian countries in the top five places and African countries at the bottom. Singapore heads the table, followed by Hong Kong. The UK is in 20th place, among higher-achieving European countries, with the US in 28th.

The OECD economic think tank says the comparisons, based on test scores in 76 countries, show the link between education and economic growth. "This is the first time we have a truly global scale of the quality of education," said the OECD's education director, Andreas Schleicher.

"The idea is to give more countries, rich and poor, access to comparing themselves against the world's education leaders, to discover their relative strengths and weaknesses, and to see what the long-term economic gains from improved quality in schooling could be for them," he said.

Rankings based on maths and science, at age 15

  1. Singapore
  2. Hong Kong
  3. South Korea
  4. Japan
  5. Taiwan
  6. Finland
  7. Estonia
  8. Switzerland
  9. Netherlands
  10. Canada
  11. Poland
  12. Vietnam
  13. Germany
  14. Australia
  15. Ireland
  16. Belgium
  17. New Zealand
  18. Slovenia
  19. Austria
  20. United Kingdom
  21. Czech Republik
  22. Denmark
  23. France
  24. Latvia
  25. Norway
  26. Luxembourg
  27. Spain
  28. Italy
  29. United States
  30. Portugal
  31. Lithuania
  32. Hungary
  33. Iceland
  34. Russia
  35. Sweden
  36. Croatia
  37. Slovak Republic
  38. Ukraine
  39. Israel
  40. Greece
  41. Turkey
  42. Serbia
  43. Bulgaria
  44. Romania
  45. UAE
  46. Cyprus
  47. Thailand
  48. Chile
  49. Kazakhstan
  50. Armenia