The Survey of Schools: ICT in education commissioned in 2011 by the European Commission took place between January 2011 and November 2012, with data collection in autumn 2011. This article presents the main findings of the Survey based on over 190,000 questionnaire answers from students, teachers and head teachers in primary, lower and upper secondary schools randomly sampled. The article details the analytical framework design and the survey methodology implemented. It then presents the main ‘state of the art’ indicators that have been built, concerning ICT infrastructure and access to it, frequency of students' ICT based activities during lessons, level of teachers' and students' confidence in their digital competences, their opinion about using ICT for teaching and learning, and the school strategies to support ICT integration in teaching and learning. The article also presents the main findings of the exploratory part of the analysis, introducing the concepts of digitally supportive school, digitally confident and supportive teacher and digitally confident and supportive student, estimating their respective proportion at EU level on average and by country and investigating whether high percentage of digitally supportive schools include high percentages of digitally confident and positive teachers and students. A few recommendations for policy making at European, national, regional/local and institutional levels conclude the article.

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The first goal of this article is to assess, for each country belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the influence of pupils' sociocultural background on educational aspirations. The second goal is to explore whether, after controlling for educational achievement, the residual influence of sociocultural background is still significant. In addition, the authors estimate whether the sociocultural and academic characteristics of school composition have an additional impact on educational aspirations in this group of countries. Finally, they show that the structural characteristics of school systems moderate the influence of individual characteristics and school composition on educational aspirations.

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In this article we discuss how apparently indicators that may appear straightforward, such as gender differences, need to be interpreted with extreme care. In particular, we consider how the assessment framework, and the methodology of international surveys, may have a potential impact on the results and on the indicators. Through analysis of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data we show how increases or decreases in the achievement of some groups of students (either of whole countries or population subgroups like males and females) can, at least partially, result from variations in the framework or the methodology of the respective assessments. The analyses provide evidence that the gender gap is larger for open-ended questions, for continuous texts and for more cognitively demanding reading tasks.