SINGAPORE, May 13 — Singapore’s education system has come out top in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) biggest global school rankings to date, reported the BBC today.

The Republic was placed ahead of Hong Kong and South Korea, which ranked second and third place respectively. Japan and Taiwan were both ranked fourth. Vietnam was the next highest ranked Asian country at 12th place, ahead of Germany and Australia. The United Kingdom was ranked 20th, while the United States was ranked 28th.

The study’s findings, based on maths and science scores of 15-year-olds, will only be formally presented at the World Education Forum in South Korea next week, reported the BBC. The OECD examined 76 countries for the study, 11 more than the last PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test it conducted in 2012.

“This is the first time we have a truly global scale of the quality of education,” BBC quoted OECD’s education director Andreas Schleicher as saying.

Mr Schleicher noted that Singapore had high levels of illiteracy into the 1960s. He added that the study’s findings could help “give more countries, rich and poor, access to comparing themselves against the world’s education leaders, to discover their relative strengths and weaknesses, and to see what the long-term economic gains from improved quality in schooling could be for them”.

Top 10 COUNTRIES RANKED ON MATHS AND SCIENCE (Source: BBC)

1. Singapore

2. Hong Kong

3. South Korea

4. Japan (joint)

4. Taiwan (joint)

6. Finland

7. Estonia

8. Switzerland

9. Netherlands

10. Canada — TODAY