Differences in achievement between disadvantaged pupils and their more advantaged peers are a focus for policy in all parts of the UK. A gap in educational outcomes between pupils from less-affluent backgrounds compared to their peers is evident by the time they start school and only widens as they move through the school years. In 2018, nearly 80…

Social mobility and improving the performance of disadvantaged pupils is a focus for policy in England, Northern Ireland and Wales. The findings from PISA 2018 provide a unique opportunity to explore the impact of disadvantage on pupils aged 15, to contextualise achievement outcomes with information about home-life and school, as well as providing…

Background/Context: Scholars have attributed the underperformance of U.S. students relative to students in other high-income countries to unequal access to high-quality educational environments. Poor students are presumed to do disproportionately worse on international achievement tests and, consequently, to pull down the U.S. average. Conversely,…

Resilience refers to the capacity of individuals to prosper despite encountering adverse circumstances. This paper defines academic resilience as the ability of 15-year-old students from disadvantaged backgrounds to perform at a certain level in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in reading, mathematics and science that…

Socioeconomic integration in schools has been shown to bring positive academic and nonacademic outcomes to disadvantaged students attending them. The academic benefits of integration on advantaged students are, by contrast, less evident. Effective integrated schools are those that promote disadvantaged students' outcomes yet advantaged students do…

This paper combines the Australian Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) micro-level data with its longitudinal continuation, the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth data, to measure the association between individual PISA scores and early school dropouts. We use multilevel modelling to distinguish between student and school…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide research project involving schools and students in over 70 countries. It is run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), takes place every three years, and is designed to examine how 15-year-olds can apply what they have learned in school to real…

This paper discusses how much of the gap in learning between poverty-stricken students and advantaged students in the US is related to a lack of educational resources and poor teaching quality. It discusses how some school systems have been able to overcome the challenges of poverty and how high-quality teaching can alleviate the effects of…

This author states that, since the civil rights movement, Americans have documented and decried--but done little to decrease--the achievement gap. This gulf, one of many that divide people by race and class, has festered in part because the larger question of inequitable investment in poor communities of color has long been neglected.…

This research aimed to determine the relative efficiency of the types of school common to three administrations of the PISA (2003-2006-2009) by comparing their results, along with the activities that are to be performed for inefficient school types and changes in the efficiency value of the school types by year. The comparative analysis was based…

Are socio-economically disadvantaged students condemned to perpetuate an intergenerational cycle of poor academic achievement, poor job prospects and poverty? Not if they attend schools that provide them with more regular classes. Resilient students in the 2006 and 2009 PISA surveys displayed high levels of academic achievement despite the fact…

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD's) Programme for International Student Assessment 2009 (PISA 2009) results show that in practically all OECD countries 15-year-old students who had attended some pre-primary school outperformed students who had not. In fact, the difference between students who had attended for more…

Income inequality has been rising in Britain for two decades and wealth is also more unequally distributed now than when New Labour first came to power. Various factors have contributed to this, including education which, according to the PISA 2006 data, has more unequal outcomes in the UK than in all but 2 of the 29 tested countries. Comparative…

Economic inequality is high and rising in a number of developed countries, including in the United Kingdom and the United States. There are growing concerns that this may have negative implications for equality of opportunity, and the extent to which social disadvantage is transmitted across generations. It is widely believed that providing…

This report explores the factors and conditions that could help more students succeed at school despite challenging socio-economic backgrounds. It does this by studying resilient students and what sets them apart from their less successful peers. Understanding how educational systems can support disadvantaged students and help them "beat the…