Teenagers from four big Chinese regions outshone their contemporaries in Western nations in a keenly watched survey of education capabilities published yesterday, which also showed no improvement trend in developed countries over the past two decades. The PISA survey is carried out every three years by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), this time among its 37 member states and 42 partner countries and economies. The latest study, based on two-hour tests taken by 600,000 15-year-olds last year, showed that students in the four Chinese regions of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang—as well as Singapore—topped the rankings, ahead of their Western counterparts in reading, mathematics and science. “In many Asian countries, the education of children is priority number one,” said Eric Charbonnier, an education analyst at the OECD. “Teachers have high-quality training and there have been investments in schools that had difficulties,” he added. In reading, which the OECD considers its headline indicator of education potential, the best performing OECD state was the tiny Baltic nation of Estonia, followed by Canada, Finland and Ireland.