McKinsey and Company

There are many different ways to improve a school system, and the complexity of this task and the uncertainty about outcomes is rightly reflected in the international debate about how this should best be done. To find out why some schools succeed where others do not, we studied twenty-five of the world’s school systems, including ten of the top performers. We examined what these high-performing school systems have in common and what tools they use to improve student outcomes.

The experiences of these top school systems suggests that three things matter most:

1) getting the right people to become teachers,

2) developing them into effective instructors and,

3) ensuring that the system is able to deliver the best possible instruction for every child.