Can do better, teachers would say on a report card. The France is in the international average in terms of the reading and comprehension skills of its CM1 class students, reveals the international Pirls study conducted in 57 countries, published Tuesday. It scored an average overall score of 514 points, above the average 500 points, but below the European average of 527 points, according to the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. Results that stabilized in 2021 compared to 2016, despite the Covid-19 crisis, and after fifteen years of continuous decline, notes the statistical agency of the Ministry of Education (Depp).

In the context of the pandemic, while France is among the OECD countries that have closed their schools the least, the vast majority of European Union (EU) countries show a statistically significant decline, on average by 11 points compared to 2016. In the 2021 study, 21 countries score higher than France. Singapore (587), Hong Kong (573) and Russia (567) are the best performers. The leading countries in the European Union are Finland (549) and Poland (549).

Girls perform better than boys

The Pirls study tested a total of 400,000 schoolchildren on their ability to understand text. French schoolchildren's results on the most complex comprehension processes ("interpret" and "appreciate") increased by nine points and those on the simplest processes ("to sample" and "infer", i.e. to draw a consequence) remained stable.

Finally, girls outperform boys in all countries except Spain and the Czech Republic. This is also the case in France, where the gap between the average score of girls (521) and boys (507) is quite marked, notes the Depp.

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