Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher, had it about right. In his 1987 work, Cool Memories, he wrote: “Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfilment.” There is statistical justification for almost any variety of wishful thinking in the 450-page Education at a Glance tome published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) yesterday. Whether the length of the work, and the closeness of the type, mean that this can be done at a glance, however, is moot.

The document tells us that spending on education in the UK has risen from 4.3 per cent of national income in 1990 to 5.9 per cent at the last count, although we are still behind the OECD average of 6.2 per cent. More worryingly, it shows the UK has slipped down the league table when it comes to secondary education: Britons aged 55-64 have the 14th-best qualifications when compared to international peers of the same age. Britons aged 25-34 are ranked 22nd.

It appears that money spent on tertiary education equates to a handsome financial investment. In the UK, if you are aged between 30 and 44, you are likely to earn 77 per cent more if you decided to go to university than if you left full-time education at 18. In Hungary, the equivalent number is 125 per cent. It also seems that 35 per cent of Britons who left school at 16 earn less than half the national average and only 1 per cent earn twice as much, or more.

Meanwhile, an average of £3,786 is spent per pupil or student per year across the OECD but nearly three times as much is spent on higher education (£7,013) than primary schooling (£2,665) – there is a similar pattern in the UK. In 2005, more than 2.7 million students enrolled in universities in OECD countries away from their homeland, with the UK taking 12 per cent of that total.

Oddly, 32 per cent of 15-year-olds in the UK expect to go to university, while 51 per cent of school-leavers actually do attend. The report says there are 1,935 people aged 25-34 with a university-level science qualification for every 100,000 of that age in employment, and that is 49 per cent more than the OECD average of 1,295 per 100,000.

When it comes to advanced research programmes, however, international students account for 40 per cent of UK enrolments. Primary school teachers in England spend 890 hours a year – or just less than five hours a day for 38 weeks – in the classroom. This, apparently, makes them among the longest working anywhere in OECD nations.

It is sensible to bear the words of Warren Buf-fett, the US investor, in mind when digesting numbers on this scale. “It is better to be approximately right,” he said, “than precisely wrong.” There is clearly no shortage of data here, and while analysis without numbers is guesswork, there is much chaff to sift from wheat. The broad, albeit impressionistic, conclusions of this report are that education is a good investment both socially and economically but the UK does not enjoy a preeminent position among international peers when it comes to educational standards. It is also abundantly clear that the Government, as well as individual schools, teachers and, most importantly, individual pupils and students, must work ever more diligently to maintain any sort of competitive advantage.