Five-year-olds and their development worldwide

IELS 2025 showed significant differences in early learning and development outcomes across participating jurisdictions:

• Children in Korea performed consistently highly in foundational learning and executive function domains.
• Children in England (United Kingdom) performed comparatively highly in emergent literacy and emergent numeracy.
• Children in Baku and Sumgait (Azerbaijan) performed comparatively highly in emergent numeracy.
• In social and emotional development, jurisdictions showed mixed profiles, with results above and below the international mean across different domains.

Gender and SES gaps

• By age 5, girls outperformed boys across the three dimensions of early learning and development measured in IELS 2025.
• Gender differences were most pronounced in social and emotional development and less pronounced in foundational learning.
• Socio-economic gaps were already visible by age 5 and were largest in foundational learning.
• Socio-economically advantaged children scored higher than disadvantaged children in emergent literacy and emergent numeracy.
• Differences linked to socio-economic background were smaller in executive function and social-emotional development but remained consistent across domains.

Home environments

• Children whose mothers had tertiary education tended to have higher scores across early learning and development domains.
• Differences associated with maternal education were largest and most consistent in emergent literacy and emergent numeracy.
• Parent-child activities, reading practices, digital practices, and parental engagement with the child’s ECEC centre or school were important home-environment factors examined in the study.