Cleverlands: Education Around the World

As a teacher in an inner-city school, Lucy Crehan became exasperated with ever-changing government policy, which claimed to be based on lessons from ‘top-performing’ education systems. She became curious about what was really going on in classrooms of countries whose teenagers ranked top in the world in reading, maths and science.

Determined to dig deeper, Lucy set off on a personal educational odyssey through Finland, Japan, Singapore, Shanghai and Canada, teaching in schools, immersing herself in their very different cultures and discovering the truths about school life that don’t appear in the charts and graphs.

Cleverlands documents her journey, weaving together her experiences with research on policy, history, psychology and culture to offer extensive new insights and provide answers to three fundamental questions:
How do these countries achieve their high scores? What can others learn from them? And what is the price of this success?