In 2022, as countries were still dealing with the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 700 000 students from 81 OECD Member and partner economies, representing 29 million across the world, took the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test.

Up to the end of the 1990s, the OECD’s comparisons of education outcomes were mainly based on measures of years of schooling, which don’t necessarily reflect what people actually know and can do. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) changed this. The idea behind PISA lay in testing the knowledge and skills of students directly, through a metric that was internationally agreed upon; linking that with data from students, teachers, schools and systems to understand performance differences; and then harnessing the power of collaboration to act on the data, both by creating shared points of reference and by leveraging peer pressure.

This edition of PISA includes data from 81 countries and economies. The test was originally planned to take place in 2021 but was delayed by one year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The exceptional circumstances throughout this period, including lockdowns and school closures in many places, led to occasional difficulties in collecting some data. While the vast majority of countries and economies met PISA’s technical standards (available on line), a small number did not. In prior PISA rounds, countries and economies that failed to comply with the standards, and which the PISA Adjudication Group judged to be consequential, could face exclusion from the main part of reporting. However, given the unprecedented situation caused by the pandemic, PISA 2022 results includes data from all participating education systems, including those where there were issues such as low response rates (see Annexes A2 and A4). The next section explains the potential limitations of data from countries not meeting specific technical standards. Readers are alerted to these limitations throughout the volume wherever appropriate.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a stress test for education systems. It revealed whether schools and students around the globe were able to adapt to sudden and profound changes in how instruction is provided and how students learn. Now that the crisis phase has passed, policy makers and schools need to know where students stand in their learning and well-being to be able to provide remedial measures for those students who fell behind in their learning or suffered emotionally or physically from the pandemic. Updated information on the resources available and the general climate in schools after the pandemic can also help education systems prepare for the future.

What should citizens know and be able to do? In response to that question and to the need for internationally comparable evidence on student performance, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 1997 and the first assessment was conducted in 2000.

This chapter identifies resilient education systems – those that weathered the disruptions related to the COVID-19 pandemic and are better prepared to ensure that learning continues even in adverse circumstances. It also discusses practices and policies in five specific areas that are common to resilient systems: learning during and from school closures; life at school and support from home; students’ pathways through school; investments in education; and school governance. Each of these will be examined more closely in the following chapters.

This chapter explores how education systems, schools and students handled the school closures imposed as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the relationships between those reponses and school systems’ resilience to disruption. The chapter examines how the duration of school closures is related to student performance and well-being, and to equity in the school system. It also explores whether education systems prepared their students for autonomous and remote learning, and how the support provided, and students’ experiences, during remote learning may have differed in more resilient school systems. The chapter concludes with a look at specific policies that education systems designed and implemented to support students in their learning and well-being during school closures.

This chapter examines students’ experiences and behaviour at school, and how these changed during and after the pandemic. It also explores whether schools provide a climate that nurtures learning and well-being, and whether they involve parents in their children’s education. The chapter also provides data and analyses on violence and bullying at school, and on pre- to post-COVID shifts in the incidence of bullying.

This chapter describes how students are selected and sorted into different grade levels, schools, programmes and classes. It discusses the length and duration of schooling, attendance at pre-primary school and grade repetition. The chapter then examines the concentration of students in schools, the age at which students are first tracked into general or vocational programmes, and how they are grouped by ability, both between and within classes. These policies are then related to student performance, and to the equity of education systems.

This chapter explores how investments in education – including in financial, human, material and time resources – are related to student performance, well-being and equity in education. It then highlights changes in schools’ and students’ readiness for digital and remote learning, including the availability and use of digital devices in school. The chapter also studies how schools serve as hubs for students’ learning and well-being.

This chapter explores how education systems balance the autonomy they give schools with the choices they give parents who are choosing a school and the mechanisms they put in place to ensure that certain quality standards are met. The chapter also examines how all of the above are related to student performance and equity of school systems.

Results from PISA offer a wealth of data points that can highlight aspects of education policy that merit further investigation and development. This chapter suggests a plan for digging deeper into PISA 2022 data to better understand how policies can be improved to meet the needs of every student.