What is going on in education in England?
Over the last few weeks, there have been two big education news stories in England: the OECD’s PISA results, and the government’s announcement of qualification reform. Half the subscribers to this Substack are from outside England, and I thought everyone might be interested in an update on what is going on here and how we are perceived in the rest of the world. This post will focus on the PISA results, and a future one will look at new government policy.
And there are legitimate critiques to make of PISA’s approach – critiques that I have made in the past, and am happy to repeat now. The irony of the “can we trust PISA” debate is that PISA is generally regarded as being a progressive alternative to more traditional national exams. It focusses on problem-solving skills and selects content with relevance to real-life situations, meaning that its questions don’t test concepts like photosynthesis and algebra in the same way you would get at GCSE. Its Director, Andreas Schleicher, repeatedly takes the progressive side in education debates, including in a set-piece debate with me in 2017. In 2015, most countries switched from taking the test on paper to taking it on screen. Every now and again, PISA comes up with some kind of new and groovy assessment formatthat they hope will reward new and groovy skills – and every time, it turns out that the countries who do best at it tend to be the ones doing best on the maths tests.
In short, PISA is a screen-based test of problem-solving skills that requires limited specific curriculum knowledge. If you wanted to design a test that would be least likely to reward England’s educational approach, and most likely to reward the approach in Scotland & Wales, it would be PISA.
And yet, England are still doing better on it.
The main alternative to PISA is a set of tests run by an international research association based in Amsterdam. They run tests of Year 5 and Year 9 science and maths, called TIMSS, and tests of Year 5 reading, called PIRLS. These tests do have more specific curriculum content in them. In the most recent round of each, England was also the only country outside of East Asia to come in the top 10 in all of TIMSS and PIRLS. It was also, again, one of the few countries to buck the trend of falling scores. So on both sets of international tests, which are run by totally different international organisations and which are trying to do different things, England is performing well, and resisting the trend of international declines.
OK, so it works in practice. But does it work in theory?
Back in 2013, I wrote an article talking about the different types of evidence we can collect to see if a particular approach works or not. One important source of evidence involves statistics on student achievement and test scores – evidence like the data from PISA and TIMSS.
