According to the study, which involved 17,276 young people aged between 13 and 17 from 20 counties, only five percent of respondents were able to justify solutions or identify multiple approaches to solving a problem to be considered at the proficient level.

“The results show that most adolescents are not functioning at a particularly high level in the skills and values assessed. There are adolescents who are performing at a very high level, indicating that such performance is well within the achievable range for the 13-17 age group. There is still a lot of work to be done in the education sector to bring more of this age group to higher levels of functioning,” the report says.