Education at a Glance is the authoritative source for information on the state of education around the world. It provides data on the structure, finances and performance of education systems across OECD countries and a number of accession and partner countries. More than 100 charts and tables in this publication - as well as links to much more available on the educational database - provide key information on the output of educational institutions; the impact of learning across countries; access, participation and progression in education; the financial resources invested in education; and teachers, the learning environment and the organisation of schools. This country note provides a country-specific overview of Greece.

This report takes the reader into the lives of young people in Finland, Greece, Israel, the Netherlands and Portugal to explore the question: how do 15-year-olds learn English? Gone are the days when learners only encountered English for a couple of hours a week in a classroom. For today's teens, English is often the preferred language of communication in increasingly diverse online and offline communities. Yet relatively little is known internationally about how students learn English inside and outside school, and the resources available to help them. This report presents country findings from interviews with 15-year-olds, English-language teachers and school principals and wider background research, as well as a comparative chapter on key international insights. The report also explores how today's digital technologies can support learners to develop foreign language proficiency. These findings support the forthcoming PISA 2025 Foreign Language Assessment through which the OECD will generate comparable data on students’ proficiency in English in different countries and on the factors related to it.

The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) examines what students know in reading, mathematics and science, and what they can do with what they know. It provides the most comprehensive and rigorous international assessment of student learning outcomes to date. Results from PISA indicate the quality and equity of learning outcomes attained around the world, and allow educators and policy makers to learn from the policies and practices applied in other countries. This country note provides a country-specific overview of Greece.

This country policy profile on education in Greece is part of the Education Policy Outlook series. It offers a concise analysis of where the education system stands today in terms of strengths, challenges and ongoing policy efforts, and how this compares to other systems. The profile brings together over a decade's worth of policy analysis by the Education Policy Outlook, as well as the latest OECD data, relevant thematic and country-specific work and other international and national evidence. It also offers analysis of Greece's system's initial responses to the COVID-19 crisis and provides insight into approaches to building greater responsiveness and resilience for the future.

After a decade of severe fiscal crisis also impacting education, Greece is looking ahead. Now is the time to invest effectively in education and define a forward-looking path for Greece. Building on the current reform agenda, this report offers an analysis of the context and underlying policy issues that once addressed, can contribute to raising the quality and equity of education in Greece. Drawing on evidence and international experience, the review highlights policy options that can guide and enhance current reform efforts in Greece in four areas: effective governance; policies for school improvement; efficiency, equity and quality of the education system; tertiary education. How can the governance and financing of Greek education be streamlined and improved? How can Greece achieve greater equity in educational provision and student outcomes? How can the Greek - qualified and well engaged - teaching force help promote school improvement? Last but not least, how can higher education help Greece restore prosperity? This report takes a hard look at the above issues, and many others. It will offer precious insights to policy makers and the education community.

The future of Greece's well-being will depend on improving educational performance to raise employment and social outcomes. The challenges are significant, as public education expenditure in Greece has declined in recent years and learning outcomes are weak. To help the Greek government address these challenges, this report proposes a set of policy options that are important to ensure that the preconditions for educational improvement exist in Greece. Among others, they include reviewing present conditions so that schools can have the capacity and the support to deliver high quality education by supporting devolution and professional autonomy; developing school leadership; providing and developing assessment and evaluation capacities; and ensuring that schools are available to all students and facilitating a smooth transition between schools and tertiary education or the labour market. This report will be followed by a more in-depth analysis and review of Greece's education system.

The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), was designed to provide insights into the availability of some of these key skills in society and how they are used at work and at home. The first survey of its kind, it directly measures proficiency in three information-processing skills: literacy, numeracy and problem-solving in technology-rich environments. This country note provides a country-specific overview of Greece.

This spotlight report draws upon the OECD report Equity and Quality in Education: Supporting Disadvantaged Students and Schools. The first section reproduces the executive summary of the report. The second section presents a snapshot of some variables on equity in education and school failure in Greece based on the indicators used in the comparative report. It also outlines some recent policy developments and suggested policy options for Greece, which are also informed by the Country Background Report prepared by Greece.

The future of Greece's well-being will depend on improving educational performance to boost productivity and improve social outcomes. In the current economic context, with the need to get best value for spending, Greece must and can address inefficiencies in its education system. The challenges are significant. For example, Greece lags behind many OECD countries in performance on PISA, including countries with the same or lower levels of expenditure per student as well as countries with the same and lower levels of economic development. Salary costs per student are above the OECD average, mostly because Greek teachers have less teaching time and Greece has smaller classes. A smaller percentage of students who enter tertiary education complete a first degree within the statutory study time than in any other country in Europe. To address the challenges, the Greek government has established a bold agenda and sought advice from a task force on the development and implementation of reform proposals that reflect best practices in OECD countries. This report provides the outcomes of the work of the task force. It presents a roadmap for how the reforms can be successfully implemented, with pointers to relevant experience in other countries. As a contribution to the on-going policy discussions in Greece, it recommends specific short-, medium- and long-term actions that can improve efficiency in the country's education system.

Teacher selection has been one of the main teacher policy concerns of the last decade in Greece. It takes place centrally and thus allows a high degree of control over the number and quality of teachers appointed to the profession. The combination of an oversupply of qualified teachers, mainly of the secondary school level with an overall high teacher retention in schools has challenged policy makers to find a way to select the most able for appointment. As a result a major reform in the teacher recruitment and selection system was introduced in 1997 and has recently come into full effect. This new system changed the way of entry to the teaching profession from one based solely on the precedence of candidate teachers in a national candidate list to one based mainly (though not exclusively) on their performance in written assessments of their subject and pedagogic knowledge. The new system of recruitment has been however received with strong objections by the teacher unions, which argue that written exams cannot assess in any valid and reliable way a candidate's teaching skills.