Thousands of 15-year-olds were left without food due to lack of money to buy food, reveals the international PISA study, which places Portugal as the country where the fewest students are affected by the problem.
“On average across OECD countries, 8.2% of students said they did not eat at least once a week in the last 30 days because there was not enough money to buy food,” the Program report says. International Student Assessment (PISA). 2022, in which around 690 thousand students from 81 countries and economies participated.
The OECD study, which has been carried out since 2000, focuses on providing knowledge to two students in Mathematics, Reading and Science, but also attempts to analyze or improve the knowledge of two students, we have been asked how often they have not eaten for lack of money.
In 2022, 81 countries participated, including Portugal, which led almost seven thousand students from 224 Portuguese schools to take the tests and respond to the surveys.
In the report, Portugal appears alongside Finland and the Netherlands as one of the three OECD countries with the lowest percentages of students going without food: Portugal has a rate of 2.6%; Finland 2.7% and Netherlands 2.8%.
In contrast, there are OECD countries where the proportion of students experiencing food insecurity is greater than 10%.
These countries include the United Kingdom (10.5%), Lithuania (11%), the United States (13%), Chile (13.1%), Colombia (13.3%), New Zealand (14.1%). %) and Turkey, where almost one in five students went without food (19.3%).
Across 18 countries and economies, more than 20% of students reported not eating at least once a week due to lack of money.
In Baku (Azerbaijan), Jamaica and the Philippines, more than a third of the students mentioned this fact, with Cambodia being the most dramatic case: more than half of the students (67.8%) are hungry.
PISA researchers highlight that countries in which at least a quarter of students declared that they did not eat at least once a week due to lack of money were those that obtained the worst results in the Mathematics test.
For this reason, the report proposes ten actions, including the construction of “solid foundations for the learning and well-being of all students”, which necessarily involves guaranteeing that all students can feed themselves.
“No system has provided all its students with the solid foundations necessary for learning and well-being, such as food security,” the study highlights.
The report published this Tuesday by the OECD also points out the increase in immigrant students in Portuguese schools: the percentage of immigrants was 7% in PISA 2018 and increased to 11% in 2022.
In Portugal, as in Chipe, the majority of foreign students who come to schools are at least 12 years old, only 15% are babies and children up to five years old.
“On average, across OECD countries in PISA 2022, the percentage of first-generation immigrant students who arrived in the host country at the age of 5 or earlier is 34%, with 29% of those arriving later of 12 years,” says the report, which presents the opposite reality in the cases of Greece and Kazakhstan, where the majority of immigrants (60) arrive before the age of five and only 15% are over 12 years old. .
Source: TSF
