One the day the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development announces its international school rankings - formulated via Pisa tests - BBC News has published an in-depth study of attitudes to education in South Korea.

The Asian nation traditionally finishes high in the Pisa rankings and the report demonstrates the commitment that many people in teaching jobs and pupils have to be high achievers.

In the affluent Seoul district of Gangnam - famously sung about by the pop star Psy - typical South Korean teenagers begin their classroom day at 8:00am and finish at 4:00pm. After a meal at home, many pupils then start a second school shift of the day either with a tutor or at a hagwon.

This professional focus on education has created a generation of people who are formidable exam performers and the BBC set six teenagers in a Gangnam high school questions from some of this years GCSE papers.

All of the pupils finished the questions in half the allotted time, with four scoring full marks and the other two dropping just one mark. To fill the time after this, they carried on doing more questions for fun.

It is this level of dedication that has seen South Korea go from mass illiteracy to economic powerhouse in just two generations and has education ministers, heads and teachers the world over looking on in envy. 

However, this has created its own social pressures and the Korean government is keen to move on and redress the balance between attainment and wellbeing, imposing a 10:00pm curfew on hagwons in Seoul. 

Education minister Nam Soo Suh said: "We still have a long way to go but we are doing some soul-searching in our society and our goals now are about how to make our people happier."

Professor JuHo Lee, a former education minister and working at the KDI think-tank in Seoul, believes the days of intensive education are now over.

"Test scores may be important in the age of industrialisation, but not anymore. So we look into the ways to reform our education system, not based on test scores, but based on creativity and social and emotional capacities," he said.

As someone who has experience in a teaching job in London or elsewhere in England, is an intensive or holistic approach likely to be more successful in this country?