EVERY THREE years the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries, releases the results of international school tests sat by 15-year-olds all across the world. There were reasons to hope that the latest data, published on September 8th, would bring positive news. Marks in mathematics, reading and science had collapsed in the previous round of testing, which was carried out just after the pandemic. Policymakers dared hope that, with the calamity well in the past, grades might start to rebound.
The OECD’s project, known as PISA , takes a measure of young people’s aptitudes as they approach the end of their compulsory school days. The results are used to create an international league table of sorts. Kids in Singapore, Macau, Taiwan and Japan follow behind. Estonia still looks the best school system in the West.Turkey is rising very fast. And there is heartening news for Britain, whose youngsters now rank inside the world’s top ten in all three disciplines. Compared with three years ago, Britain has pushed up its science results and held reading and mathematics broadly steady. That counts as a good result when many others are heading down. What is causing this decline? The lingering impact of the pandemic doubtless has a role. PISA may itself share some blame for setting school reformers on a dodgy course. Policymakers who trekked to Helsinki for lessons returned with messages that teachers in their home countries were only too happy to receive. Finland appeared to have achieved striking results with only limited testing and inspections. It argued that teachers should spend less time talking in front of blackboards and more time helping pupils work things out for themselves. Yet since that first test almost no country has seen its scores fall as steeply as Finland—a slide that continues in the latest results. If that is the case, the error may have set dozens of school systems off-course.
The number of school systems taking part has expanded over the years: the latest tests were sat in all 38 OECD member-countries and in 53 other places (many of them developing economies). This year, as in almost every round since 2000, Asian school systems rule the roost. In science and maths they score 100 points above the average for OECD countries (as a broad rule of thumb, 20 points is considered to be about as much as an average pupil gains in a full year of learning). The youngsters who participated in this year’s PISA tests were about ten years old when covid-19 hit; it is possible they were hurt more by the disruptions of that era than teenagers who were further into their school careers. When the tests were first carried out in 2000, Finland shocked the world by coming top of the table.
Because the tests are sat in only four rich provinces), children in China—taking part for the first time since 2018—have wiped the floor with almost everyone else (though scores there are skewed.
Its educational establishment espoused “play-based” learning, especially for younger children. Finland’s critics posit that the high marks it achieved in 2000 in fact reflected old-fashioned educational approaches that were still prevalent in its schools well into the 1990s—and not the newer “progressive” policies for which it became famous.
That England’s policies have had some protective effect on school marks is most evident when comparing it with school systems just next door that have chosen a starkly different path (see chart 3). Twenty years ago children in Scotland outperformed their peers south of the border. Now they tend to do worse—even though school spending per pupil is much higher. Scotland’s critics blame a modish curriculum, as well as a lax approach to discipline. Covid or screens do not explain the disparity, given that these scourges have affected all children in Britain in a fairly similar way.
