The report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), released on Wednesday, was based on test scores in math and science from 15-year-olds in 76 nations.
Australia ranked 14th while Singapore and Hong Kong took out first and second place respectively.
“This is the first time we have a truly global scale of the quality of education,” OECD education director, Andreas Schleicher, told the BBC.
"The idea is to give more countries, rich and poor, access to comparing themselves against the world's education leaders, to discover their relative strengths and weaknesses, and to see what the long-term economic gains from improved quality in schooling could be for them."
The rankings were compiled based on research conducted by the OECD, academics in the US and tests run in Latin America.
Top thirty nations based on math and science scores:
| 1 | Singapore |
| 2 | Hong Kong |
| 3 | South Korea |
| 4 | Japan and Taiwan |
| 6 | Finland |
| 7 | Estonia |
| 8 | Switzerland |
| 9 | Netherlands |
| 10 | Canada |
| 11 | Poland |
| 12 | Vietnam |
| 13 | Germany |
| 14 | Australia |
| 15 | Ireland |
| 16 | Belgium |
| 17 | New Zealand |
| 18 | Slovenia |
| 19 | Austria |
| 20 | United Kingdom |
| 21 | Czech Republic |
| 22 | Denmark |
| 23 | France |
| 24 | Latvia |
| 25 | Norway |
| 26 | Luxembourg |
| 27 | Spain |
| 28 | United States of America (USA) and Italy |
| 30 | Portugal |