Trends In Equalities report (Summary)

Trends in Inequality in Educational Achievement in Europe

Report on Trends of Inequalities (March 2026) — A quantitative cross-country analysis of international assessment data (TIMSS, PIRLS, PISA) examining 25 years of educational achievement gaps and the empirical impact of ECEC reforms.

Key Executive Findings

Analyzing large-scale assessment studies across EU Member States, Norway, and the UK reveals persistent gaps in student achievement linked to family background, gender, migration status, and school location, alongside critical insights into early childhood education policies.

• Socioeconomic Status (Parental Education): The gap between students with highly educated parents and those without remains the largest and most persistent inequality dimension. Between 2011 and 2023, this gap widened significantly in 8th-grade mathematics across multiple countries (e.g., Hungary, Cyprus, Finland).
• Gender Disparities: Boys maintain a small performance advantage in mathematics at 4th and 8th grades, which slightly widened over the last decade. Conversely, girls outperform boys in reading across all systems, a gap that becomes substantially wider by age 15 (PISA).
• Migrant Gap & Language Acquisition: First-generation migrant students consistently score lower than native peers. While some primary-level convergence was observed in 4th-grade reading (e.g., Hungary, Czech Republic), reading achievement gaps remain sizeable at secondary level (age 15).
• Urban-Rural Divide: Students in urban schools (>15,000 population) consistently outperform peers in rural schools, with disparities being moderate in primary education but noticeably larger in lower secondary education.
• Intersectional Disadvantage: Compounded disadvantages are particularly severe for girls from low-SES households and rural students with lower parental education, showing persistent or worsening gaps over time in countries like Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Portugal.

Statistical Trends in Achievement Gaps

The table below summarizes the longitudinal trends and key assessment findings across the analyzed ILSA datasets (TIMSS, PIRLS, PISA):

Empirical Impact of ECEC Reforms

A key analytical focus of the STRIDE report is testing whether expanding Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC / ISCED 0) reduces socioeconomic achievement gaps. Multi-level modeling across 17 reform countries and 6 non-reform countries yields crucial findings:

• Overall Achievement Boost: Expanding ECEC access correlates with statistically significant improvements in average test scores for all student groups 5 years post-reform.
• The Equity Paradox: Simply expanding overall ECEC enrolment does not automatically narrow the achievement gap. Higher-SES families often utilize expanded ECEC services more effectively, preserving or slightly widening the gap relative to low-SES peers.
• Closing the Participation Gap: ECEC expansion successfully reduces reading achievement gaps only when policy directly targets and reduces the participation gap between low-SES and high-SES children (Steinmann et al., 2026).
• Minimum Attendance Duration: For migrant children, ECEC attendance has a strong equalizing effect on 4th-grade reading scores, but requires at least 2 to 3 years of attendance to show significant gap reduction (Strømme et al., 2025).