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Belgian children ranked last in international literacy study
Education
09:15 24/07/2019
Belgium has come last in an international study of children's reading skills, which compared literary skills in 28 developed countries.
The Pirls (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) compared children's reading ability in the fourth year of primary school - around the age of nine and 10 - across 28 OECD member countries.
Belgium's score of 497 is behind the EU average of 542, the study found.
Simon Casterman, vice-president of the Association of Belgian Publishers, said the findings were alarming.
"Only 22% of Belgian school pupils at this age have a good command of reading while the average of the EU member states is 50%," he said.
The countries with the highest average reading achievement were Russia, Singapore and Hong Kong.
Comments
Belgian schools used to be among the best in the world, but that was when there still existed the freedom to pick a school for your child, before politicians started putting their noses in our private business and ruin everything, as usual.
this study was done in 2016 why is it suddenly news? Also apples and oranges how can you possibly assess if Russian education is the same as Belgian? Russia coming near the top maybe its to do with the way they test also and its impossible to find a report on line to understand why Belgian scored so low
Simply means that Belgium has a lot of immigrant children who are not learning the official languages, or doing well in their studies. All countries that have a large percentage of immigrants compared to others in studies such as this, fair poorly. They could have mentioned this in this article, but that would favor facts at the expense of political correctness.