Reconsidering Basic Education Problems in Turkey Through The Result of Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC)

The Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) results announced in June 28th, 2016 shows that Turkey takes place near the bottom with its low points at all skills among 24 countries. In this article, it is aimed to analyse the PIAAC results in terms of the problems of basic education. With this aim, literature review and documentary research methods are used to obtain data. Obtained data have been analysed by descriptive analysis method. Thus, chronic problems of basic education such as access, participation, quality and gender inequality are evident in Turkey results. For instance, Turkey falls far behind the other countries in terms of participation to pre-basic and basic education. Moreover there are serious problems about quality in both formal and informal education at the level of basic education. Besides those problems, gender inequality problems also have reflections in the results (for instance, literacy: difference between men and women is eleven points, numeracy: difference between men and women is twenty seven points). Therefore, there is a necessity for reconsidering, identifying and recovering current deficiencies of formal education system in terms of sustaining access to education, gender inequality and participation, quality.