One of the ultimate goals of policy makers is to enable citizens to take advantage of a globalised world economy. This is leading them to focus on the improvement of education policies, ensuring the quality of service provision, a more equitable distribution of learning opportunities and stronger incentives for greater efficiency in schooling.

Canada, Finland, Japan, Korea and the partner economies Hong Kong-China and Shanghai-China all perform well above the OECD mean performance and students tend to perform well regardless of their own background or the school they attend. They not only have large proportions of students performing at the highest levels of reading proficiency, but also relatively few students at the lower proficiency levels.

Are students well prepared to meet the challenges of the future? Can they analyse, reason and communicate their ideas effectively? Have they found the kinds of interests they can pursue throughout their lives as productive members of the economy and society? The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) seeks to answer these questions through its triennial surveys of key competencies of 15-year-old students in OECD member countries and partner countries/economies. Together, the group of countries participating in PISA represents nearly 90% of the world economy.

This chapter focuses on the magnitude of differences in student performance across countries, as well as between and within schools. It also describes the extent to which these differences relate to the socio-economic background of students and schools.

In discussing equity and equality in education, this chapter examines how differences in student performance are distributed across countries and schools, and the extent to which students and schools with different socio-economic backgrounds have access to similar educational resources, both in quantity and quality. It also discusses the impact of students’ family background and school location on learning outcomes.

This chapter examines the relationship between student performance and different aspects of socio-economic background. It also discusses the extent to which countries have been able to moderate the impact of socio-economic background on learning outcomes. The chapter defines and uses the socio-economic gradient extensively, which summarises many of the aspects of educational equity that can be analysed by PISA.

On average, more than 10% of 15-year-old students across OECD countries are foreign-born or have foreign-born parents. This chapter compares the reading performance of students with an immigrant background with the performance of students without an immigrant background in the same country, and with the performance of students in other countries. It examines performance differences among first- and second-generation immigrants; and between those students who speak a different language at home than the one in which they were assessed, and those who speak the same language at home. Performance in reading is also analysed according to immigrant students’ country or region of origin.

This chapter analyses the impact of the socio-economic background of schools on reading performance. The socio-economic gradient used extensively in Chapter 3 is used here to describe how students’ socioeconomic background is related to their performance within the same school, and how a school’s average level of performance is related to the socio-economic composition of its student intake.

While all countries participating in PISA 2009 show a relationship between home background and educational outcomes, some countries show that high levels of performance and equity of educational opportunities can be jointly achieved. What can explain these positive outcomes? This chapter discusses policies that target lowperforming students or schools, target socio-economically disadvantaged students or schools, and more universally aim to raise educational standards for all students.

PISA is a collaborative effort, bringing together scientific expertise from the participating countries, steered jointly by their governments on the basis of shared, policy-driven interests.