Equity in Education -Breaking Down Barriers to Social Mobility

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264073234-en

In times of growing economic inequality, improving equity in education becomes more urgent. While some countries and economies that participate in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) have managed to build education systems where socio-economic status makes less of a difference, students from disadvantaged backgrounds continue to lag substantially behind their more advantaged peers in academic performance throughout the world, a new study from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has found. The gap between the science performance of advantaged and disadvantaged students was 88 points on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2015, or the equivalent of three years of schooling, the study found.