Russia’s 10-year-olds are the best in the world at reading, according to a new international league table published today.
The 2016 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls) shows that England came 10th out of 50 countries, but there are only seven countries which had statistically significant higher scores - meaning that England could be considered as joint 8th.
In 2011, England was ranked 11th out of 45 countries.
Other high performers included Singapore, Hong Kong and Ireland.
The study, which is run by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) in Amsterdam, and Boston College, USA, tested more than 319,000 students in 50 countries.
The findings are shown below:
Ranking 2016 (Ranking 2011)
Country
Average scale score
1 (2)
Russia
581
2 (4)
Singapore
576
3 (1)
Hong Kong
569
4 (10)
Ireland
567
5 (3)
Finland
566
6 (28)
Poland
565
7 (5)
Northern Ireland
565
8 (31)
Norway
559
9 (9)
Taiwan
559
10 (11)
England
559
11 (-)
Latvia
558
12 (15)
Sweden
555
13 (20)
Hungary
554
14 (22)
Bulgaria
552
15 (6)
US
549
16 (16)
Lithuania
548
17 (16)
Italy
548
18 (7)
Denmark
547
19 (-)
Macao
546
20 (13)
Netherlands
545
Source: Pirls 2016
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