The mafia may be running amok on the streets of St Petersburg, but the classrooms are full of highly motivated, self-disciplined scholars. Well that’s how it seems in comparison to schools in Sunderland, say, or eastern Kentucky.

Adolescents growing up in these three very different places were questioned by researchers about their attitudes to education. The Russians proved to have startlingly higher motivation.

But what the British and American pupils lacked in classroom engagement and work rate, they more than made up for in self-satisfaction, believing that they worked as hard as they could.

So say Neil Hufton and Julian Elliott of the University of Sunderland and Leonid Illushin of Hertzen University in St Petersberg, who interviewed 144 pupils aged 14 and 15 for their paper, Educational Motivation and Engagement: qualitative accounts from three countries.

In a Russian school it is not just the teacher who is pleased with high achievers. While British pupils and their American counterparts despised “swots” and “nerds” for throwing a poor light on their less able or diligent classmates, the Russians respect and admire fellow pupils who get top marks.

But American “nerds” have an even worse time than British “swots”. Diligent pupils are derided for their undermining predilection for study, but nerds, unlike swots, are also considered badly-dressed, social misfits.

It is not only inside the classroom that the three nationalities differ, they also have distinct ways of spending their spare time.

About half the St Petersburg pupils took some extra evening class. In Kentucky they participated in or supported school organised sports.

And in Sunderland? In Sunderland they liked to hang out in the shopping arcade.