These rankings are based on the UN Human Development Index. The index is made up of only four different statistics: 1) the country's life expectancy, 2) the average number of years of schooling for each person 25 years of age and over, 3) the expected number of years of schooling, and 4) the per capita gross national income. Britain scores relatively low because it has a large immigrant population. And unlike most of the immigrants to the US, Canada, and Australia, a large number of immigrants to Britain (primarily from South Asia and Africa) have limited formal schooling.
The HDI does not, however, take into account the quality of the education that someone receives. It's one thing to spend 13 years in school to complete a secondary education, but there is a big difference between spending that time in schools in, say, Russia as opposed to Germany. You are on average going to get a better education in the latter than in the former. Although, the quality of education is probably fairly even across the countries of the EU, so I imagine you are as likely to get a good education in Slovenia as you are in Britain, but Slovenia probably doesn't have a lot of immigrants pulling down the national average, so that's why it ranks higher than Britain. |
3 Letter Europe 
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