Among its many findings, our PISA 2018 assessment shows that 15-year-old students in the four provinces of China that participated in the study – Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang – outperformed by a large margin their peers from all of the other 78 participating education systems, in mathematics and science. Moreover, the 10% most disadvantaged students in these four provinces also showed better reading skills than those of the average student in OECD countries, as well as skills similar to the 10% most advantaged students in some of these countries. True, these four provinces in eastern China are far from representing China as a whole, but the size of each of them compares to that of a typical OECD country, and their combined populations amount to over 180 million. What makes their achievement even more remarkable is that the level of income of these four Chinese regions is well below the OECD average. The quality of their schools today will feed into the strength of their economies tomorrow.

Up to the end of the 1990s, OECD comparisons of education outcomes were mainly based on measures of years of schooling, which is not a reliable indicator of what people actually know and can do. With the Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, we tried to change this. The transformational 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.

Worldwide trends and global crises, such as technological change, growing inequality and pandemics, are posing new challenges to education systems and schools around the world. School-management policies and practices play a key role in determining how education systems respond to these challenges.

The data referred to in this volume are presented in and, in greater detail, including additional tables, on the PISA website (www.oecd.org/pisa).

“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 2000.

This chapter defines the four areas of school organisation that are examined in Volume V of the PISA 2018 Results: grouping and selecting students; resources invested in education; governance of education systems; and evaluations and assessments. It also discusses how much of the variation in student performance is related to system-, school- and student-level factors, and how to interpret the data presented.

This chapter examines how students progress through schooling, based on government regulations, family decisions and students’ own performance and interests. It discusses such issues as the length and duration of schooling, pre-primary education, and grade repetition, and examines the relationships between these factors, on the one hand, and student performance and equity in education, on the other.

This chapter describes how students are selected and sorted into different programmes or tracks, both between and within schools. It discusses the age at which students are first tracked and the types of programmes into which they are tracked (general or vocational). Grouping students by ability, both between and within classes, is also examined. These policies are then related to student performance and equity in the education system.

This chapter focuses on teachers: whether schools have an adequate number of them, whether they are sufficiently qualified, their working conditions. It also examines the availability of support staff to provide career guidance at school. Each of these factors is then related to student performance and equity in the education system.

This chapter explores how material resources - including the physical infrastructure of a school and the educational materials available in the school - are related to student performance and equity in education. The chapter highlights the availability and quality of computers and Internet access at school, and whether teachers are adequately prepared to use these digital tools effectively in their lessons.

This chapter describes how much time students devote to learning, both in school and after school hours. In addition to time spent learning the core PISA subjects of reading, mathematics and science, for the first time, PISA has data on the time students spend learning foreign languages in school. The chapter also examines the types of extracurricular activities that are available to students at school, from remedial or enhancement classes, to art clubs and orchestras. These findings are then related to student performance and equity in education systems.

This chapter explores the relationship between school type (broadly, public or private), on the one hand, and student performance and equity in the education system, on the other. It also examines whether giving parents a greater choice of schools for their child is related to the quality of the education system, as a whole.

This chapter examines four evaluation and assessment activities in particular: student assessments, data-collection practices, school accountability and improvement actions at school. It discusses how school systems use the information they gather from these evaluations and assessments. The ways school systems use this data are then correlated with student performance and equity in the education system.

This chapter provides a synthesis of the PISA results concerning school policies and practices, and how they are related to both student performance and equity across a school system. It also summarises the characteristics common to high-performing and equitable school systems.

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