The Guardian – Richard Adams
“The UK economy could grow by billions of pounds a year if underachieving youngsters all obtained basic skills at school and boys and girls achieved similar levels of educational attainment, according to a new report commissioned by the OECD. Currently 20% of pupils in England, Scotland and Wales leave school lacking basic skills in areas such as numeracy, while boys and girls achieve uneven results in subjects such as maths and science. But efforts to reduce those gaps over the next 15 years would more than pay for themselves, according to the OECD’s analysis. The figures were compiled by two economists, Eric Hanushek of Stanford’s Hoover Institution and Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich, and based on the international rankings of 15-year-olds using the OECD’s triennial Pisa tests across 76 countries. Spread over the working lifetime of students in school by 2030, the economists project that bringing all pupils up to the same minimum level of achievement would increase the UK’s national output by more than £2tn by 2095, spread over 65 years.”(more)