The first thing I would try and understand is what is the index measuring. My guess is it's picked a bunch of arbitrary variables - such as average school leaving age or percentage attending university and inferred the quality of education from that measure. Like any measure, it's going to be mostly arbitrary and not really tell you a great deal about what's going on.
The second thing I'd pay attention to is internal variability. The countries near the top of the list have far more homogeneous populations than the UK or the US. It's much easier to satisfy the needs of a homogeneous population than the needs of a more diverse population. I suspect if you take out the lowest 2% of schools and PCT regions, the UK would shoot up that list. If you're not in one of those areas, then you're probably doing much better.
The third issue would be tax. What is the average tax take in the relative countries. Generally, the lower the tax take, the higher the level of private contributions to 'human development' (ie private education and health). Where you have a mixed public and private system, you can usually spend money and receive superior services.
Finally, it's not clear how big a difference 0.025 makes on that index. My guess is the difference is actually trivial.
The index itself is pretty meaningless without context. I'd expect this sort of thing to be used by the Daily Mail: it's just their sort of nonsense. The slightest glimmer of intelligent thought renders the point moot.
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