ABSTRACT
In the second half of 2013, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported comparative findings of the educational performance of 16-24 year olds in 24 nations. Young adults in England were found to rank 22nd in literacy and 21st for numeracy. The highest performing countries for numeracy were the Netherlands, Finland and Japan, and for literacy, Finland, Japan and South Korea. Despite frequent criticisms of the methods and procedures employed in large-scale assessments of this kind (Gaber et al. 2012; Goldstein 2004; Prais 2003, 2007; Roth et al. 2006), and the problems of reducing complex datasets to simplistic aggregated rankings (Wrigley 2004) the OECD findings confirmed the long-standing superiority of Finland and South East Asian countries across multiple international comparative studies of literacy and numeracy.
