Editorial
The Guardian
6 December 2016
Tony Blair wanted to be remembered for his education reforms, and the latest results from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment – Pisa – the triennial survey of the skills of 15-year-olds suggest that if only he had concentrated on his domestic agenda, he probably would have been.
The Pisa scores are notorious for revealing no consistent message, but it is striking that England’s 15-year-olds are performing about as well as three years ago, where Scotland and Wales, where reform was rebuffed, are in decline.
Overall, the UK’s performance is almost unchanged: a little above the OECD average, still a long way behind Singapore, Japan and Estonia, but well ahead of Italy, Israel and Iceland. There is a marginal improvement in the UK’s ranking, despite a slight decline in scores.
It is unhappy reading for Tories who only last year pledged in their election manifesto to make Britain the best place to study by 2020; but when the individual countries of the UK are broken out from the overall UK result, it becomes clear that Mr Blair’s aggressive focus on English education appears to have paid off.
Education specialists argue that it takes about a decade for changes to affect outcomes on a large scale. In science, reading and maths, England now outperforms the rest of the UK. Wales and Scotland both opted out of league tables and other Blairite reforms in the early 2000s.
Now they are playing catch up. In particular Scotland, for so long the top performer in the UK, has suffered an unexpected fall in outcomes since 2012. No wonder the SNP now suggest the results “strongly reinforced” the case for change.
The real value of the Pisa survey lies in the detail. This makes bleaker reading for the UK as a whole.
Twice as many Britons are low achievers in maths, for example, as are outstanding. Unexpectedly, there is no correlation between outcomes and either national income or per capita school spending.
One worry is that the government will attempt to use figures to claim high-performing English grammar schools – which record near-perfect science scores – represent a model to replicate. They do not.
The more academically selective systems are, the more socially selective they become.
It’s true that the Dutch system bucks this trend, but it is the result of having selection at 14, coupled with high levels of spending on those left behind.
Whatever the Pisa scores reveal, ministers should promote high achievement – in every school.