The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has summarised its research findings on the education of 1st and 2nd generation pupils from its regular PISA surveys. The more detailed analysis can be found in its PISA chapter on equity and its ad hoc "PISA in Focus" series.

The main findings are that the performance of immigrant students is strongly related to the characteristics of the school systems in their host country, although students' prior education, family situation and immigration experience also has a profound impact on students’ achievement at school:

• Changes in the performance of immigrant students over time also suggest that education policies can complement social policies in fostering integration.
• Results varied widely, not only overall, but also in the extent to which first- and second-generation immigrant students were more or less likely than students without an immigrant background to feel that they belong at school...
• It is not the concentration of immigrant students in a school but, rather, the concentration of socioeconomic disadvantage in a school that hinders student achievement.
• For recent immigrants, a lack of familiarity with their new country’s language and institutions, as well as insecure living conditions, can result in lower reading performance. 
• 15-year-old immigrant students who reported that they had attended pre-primary education programmes score 49 points higher in the PISA reading assessment, on average, than immigrant students who reported that they had not participated in such programmes. But in most countries, participation in pre-primary education programmes among immigrant students is considerably lower than it is among students without an immigrant background.
• Immigrant students are found to be more likely to repeat grades even after accounting for their performance in mathematics and reading and their socio-economic status
• After accounting for socio-economic status and performance in reading and mathematics, immigrant students are 44% more likely than non-immigrant students to be enrolled in vocational programmes.
• On average across OECD countries, only 4% of students attend schools whose principal reported that ethnic heterogeneity is a serious obstacle to learning.
• Not surprisingly, principals of disadvantaged schools are much more likely than principals of advantaged schools to report that ethnic diversity hinders learning
• Many teachers, themselves, feel ill-prepared to teach ethnically diverse classes...Large proportions of teachers in several countries...reported, through the 2013 OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), that they need more professional development in the area of teaching in a multicultural or multilingual setting. The proportions are strikingly large ... in the European countries that recently saw rapid increases in the linguistic and cultural diversity in their schools, notably Italy and Spain.

What can countries do? The OECD makes the following recommendations:

1. Provide information to immigrant parents and help them to overcome financial and/or logistical barriers
2. Limit the extent to which advantaged schools can select students based on socio-economic status.
3. Retain and attract more advantaged students in schools that also host immigrant students
4. Integrate language and subject learning from the earliest grades
5. Help teachers to identify students who need language training
6. Expand access to high-quality early childhood education and care programmes
7. Tailor programmes to the needs of pre-school migrant children
8. Reach out to migrant parents
9. Monitor the quality of early childhood education and care programmes
10. Reduce or eliminate the use of ability grouping and grade repetition
11. Avoid early tracking
12. Provide specific, formal training on diversity, intercultural pedagogy and language development for school leaders and teachers
13. Train teachers in formative assessments
14. Offer incentives for teachers and school leaders to work in disadvantaged schools