This 2006 edition of Education at a Glance enables countries to see themselves in the light of other countries’ performance. It provides a rich, comparable and up-to-date array of indicators on the performance of education systems and represents the consensus of professional thinking on how to measure the current state of education internationally.  The indicators look at who participates in education, what is spent on it and how education systems operate and the results achieved. The latter includes indicators on a wide range of outcomes, from comparisons of student’s performance in key subject areas to the impact of education on earnings and on adults’ chances of employment.

New material in this edition includes further analysis of results of the 2003 survey of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), including student access to and use of ICT, analysis of the lowest performing students; and the effects on students performance of family background and the way classes are organised in schools; trend data on tertiary qualifications, including projections for the year 2014; trend data on survival rates in tertiary education; the impact of demographic trends on education systems, as well as projections on expenditure for the year 2015; trend data on expected years of education; instruction time per subject for 9-to-14-year-olds; and a picture of student mobility and the significance of internationalisation of higher education.

The ExcelTM spreadsheets used to create the tables and charts in this book are available via the StatLinks printed in this book.