Ranking Irish secondary education

Every 3 years the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development does a standardised test to measure the educational attainment of secondary school students across many countries in the world.  The point of the test is to be able to compare how educational systems are doing across countries despite differences in structure.  It’s very mixed news for Ireland: we’re clearly up in the broad group of countries that we’d want to be up with, but very much near the bottom of that group.

The analysis wasn’t supposed to be released till Tuesday but the OECD published them ahead of time because they were leaked to a magazine in Spain (where undoubtedly the issue played up was that Spain was ranked similar to eastern European and developing countries).   Here’s the press release and here’s the table of rankings.  

For this round, the test was focused on science.  Because only a sample of students in each country take the test, the rankings are not exact and so there is an upper and lower rank for each country.   Ireland’s rank is in the 10th-16th range among OECD countries, and 15th-22nd for all countries in the exercise.   The fact that the rankings are a range and not exact was apparently lost on either the ASTI or RTE, which chose to focus on the 15th spot and make it sound like good news.  We’re just about significantly above the OECD average but well below countries that would love to repeat the Celtic Tiger experience (e.g. Estonia and Slovenia) and would therefore be chasing the same type of industries that we hope to attract with promises of an educated workforce.

In fairness though we’re above countries that might have expected to do better, such as France, the aforementioned Spain, and the USA — so the system does get some things right.   When the detailed results are released next week, it may provide a better understanding of how the results relate to spending on education and thus whether there is a health-style mystery of wondering where all the money went.  In any event, given the tendency in Ireland to rank ourselves, if at all, against the UK only, studies like these provide a better international perspective.