Resilience in an education context is generally defined as children or students who are from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds and who achieve high learning outcomes ( (Ye, Strietholt and Blömeke, 2021[11])). In IELS and PISA, high learning outcomes are defined as learning scores in the top quartile for all students in a particular learning domain, such as in literacy or numeracy.
In IELS, a small proportion of disadvantaged five-year-olds have early learning outcomes that place them in the top quartile for all children. Around one in five disadvantaged children have learning scores in the top quartile in the two executive function skills of mental flexibility and working memory, and in social-emotional skills. Smaller proportions of disadvantaged children (14%) achieve in the top quartile in emergent literacy and in emergent numeracy (Figure 3.1. ).