A new OECD report has found that Finnish teenagers leaving high school have better literacy skills than many university graduates in other countries, including New Zealand.
The international study compared adult reading comprehension across 24 countries, with at least 5,000 participants in each. Finnish secondary school leavers scored an average of 288, above the average literacy levels of graduates from New Zealand, Italy, Spain and Ireland. By contrast, Finnish university graduates scored 313, the highest in the world.
Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s education director, called the findings “deeply troubling.” He said: “A Finnish high school graduate has pretty much the same skills as an English university graduate, and that’s true for many countries.” He warned that the trend suggests a disconnect between the skills universities test and the literacy skills adults actually need.
“In the case of England, the skills of adults have been pretty flat, and degrees are rising,” Schleicher added. “How do we interpret this? Are those skills not measuring what universities want to be about, or do we see it as a kind of inflation of degrees?”
Centrist Ltd. 2025