Educational inequalities in Greece, Sweden and the United Kingdom: A comparative analysis of the origins

The analysis of the PISA results indicates that both Greece and the United Kingdom show a degree of inequality in students’ achievement, whereas Sweden demonstrates comparatively high levels of educational equality. Educational inequality can be measured in two ways: standard deviations which give the spread of scores in a given country and the socioeconomic gradient which measures how far social origin effects influence individual achievement. According to results from PISA, the overall variation in student performance is much higher in the United Kingdom and Greece than in Sweden (OECD 2001:253, Table 2.3a) and the relationship between student performance and socioeconomic background is again considerably stronger in the first two countries (OECD 2001:308, Table 8.1