PISA 2009 in England

British schoolchildren now ranked

23rd in the world, down from 12th 

in 2000

By Toby Young Politics Last updated: December 7th, 2010

British pupils are 25th in the world for reading (Photo: PA)

British schoolchildren are now ranked 16th in the world for science, 25th for reading and 28th for maths, according to the OECD’s 2009 PISA report. That compares with a 2000 PISA ranking of 4th for science, 7th for reading and 8th for maths. This is conclusive proof that Labour’s claim to have “improved” Britain’s schools during its period in office is utter nonsense. Spending on education increased by £30 billion under the last government, yet between 2000-09 British schoolchildren plummeted in the international league tables and are now ranked behind those of Poland, Estonia and Slovenia.
Labour apologists will respond in two ways to this report. The most simple-minded of them will simply ignore it and continue to point to GCSE results as evidence of school “improvement”. Not surprisingly, this is the response of Andy Burnham, Labour’s virtually invisible shadow education secretary. “Schools improved under Labour, and more students now leave with good results,” he told the BBC’s website. While the second half of that statement is true, if we combine it with the 2009 PISA report it is proof – if proof were needed – that GCSEs have been dumbed down. What Labour did over the past 13 years was to collude with the exam boards to keep lowering the bar in a desperate attempt to demonstrate that Britain’s schools were getting better.
A second, more sophisticated response is to accept that Britain’s education system is getting worse, but to claim it’s not the fault of the system itself, but of the UK’s ever-increasing levels of income inequality. This is the conclusion of Dr Alice Sullivan, a lecturer at the Institute of Education, who has just completed a survey  on the impact of socio-economic background on children’s early years attainment based on the Millennium Cohort Study. She claims the solution to the under-achievement of poor children is “redistributive economic policies”.
However, this is not the conclusion of the 2009 PISA report. The OECD researchers found that the impact socio-economic background has on learning outcomes does not vary from country to country according to income inequality:

If social inequalities in societies were always closely linked to the impact which social disadvantage has on learning outcomes, the role for public policy to improve equity in the distribution of learning opportunities would be limited, at least in the short term. However, there is almost no relationship between income inequalities in countries and the impact which socio-economic background has on learning outcomes, that is, some countries succeed even under difficult conditions to moderate the impact of socio-economic background on educational success.

Clearly, the fault does not lie in Labour’s failure to adopt more redistributive economic policies – sorry, Gordon Brown – but in its failure to create a more equitable education system. The OECD researchers found that in Finland, Japan, Turkey, Singapore, Korea, Macao-China, Hong Kong-China and Shanghai-China, more than 40% of disadvantaged pupils excel at school despite their disadvantaged background. (For more on the invalidity of the income inequality argument, see my Spectator column on The Spirit Level.)
The 2009 PISA report is not all doom and gloom, however. The findings of the OECD researchers suggest that the Coalition’s policy of allowing parents and teachers to set up free schools and granting outstanding state schools the opportunity to convert to Academy status may have a positive impact on learning outcomes. In general, the researchers found that the more autonomy schools have, the better they perform:

Results from PISA suggest that school autonomy in defining the curriculum and assessment relates positively to the systems’ overall performance. For example, school systems that provide schools with greater discretion in making decisions regarding student assessment policies, the courses offered, the course content and the textbooks used, tend to be school systems that perform at higher levels.

The 2009 report also suggests the Coalition is right to reject an expansion of grammar schools as the solution to Britain’s low levels of social mobility. In general, the more selection according to ability there is within a country’s education system, the greater the correlation between a child’s socio-economic status and that child’s learning outcomes:

The data from PISA show that creating homogeneous schools and/or classrooms through selection is unrelated to the average performance of education systems, but clearly associated with larger variation in student achievement and a significantly larger impact of socio-economic background on learning outcomes. In particular, the earlier in the student’s career the selection occurs, the greater the impact of socio-economic background on learning outcomes. That suggests that selection tends to reinforce inequalities as students from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to be exposed to lower quality learning opportunities when compared to their peers from more advantaged socio-economic backgrounds.

No doubt some will suspect me of cherry-picking from the 2009 PISA report to advance the cause of educational reformers and undermine the defenders of the status quo, like the Labour Party and the teaching unions. I would urge any such sceptics to go to the OECD’s website and take a look at the report. It really is essential reading for anyone who wants to make an informed, evidence-based assessment of Labour’s education policies and those of the Coalition. You can link to the results for the UK in the PISA 2009 assessment here.
However, for those of you who don’t have time to read it, here’s a summary of the most interesting findings:
* Of the 65 countries included in the OECD survey, the UK is ranked eighth when it comes to spending per pupil. It’s average position in the international league table, by contrast, is 23rd.
* The UK spends on average $60,000 on a pupil between the ages of 6 and 15, compared to $40,000 in Poland and Estonia. Nevertheless, Poland and Estonia are both above the UK in the league table.
* As a rule, countries with fewer-than-average discipline problems in the classroom perform better and countries with more perform worse. Within the UK, the 25% of pupils reporting the poorest disciplinary climate are 1.8 times as likely to be poor performers.
* Twenty-one per cent of UK headteachers report that the performance of pupils is hindered by the low expectations of teachers, compared to only six per cent of headteachers reporting a similar problem in Finland. In addition, 17% of UK headteachers claim pupil performance is being hindered by teachers “resisting change”.
* Twenty-sevent per cent of UK pupils are in schools in which 48% of pupils are socio-economically disadvantaged. In these schools, disadvantaged children tend to do worse than expected, but advantaged students tend to do much worse than expected. (It follows that middle class parents who avoid sending their children to schools with an above-average number of pupils eligible for free school meals are, contrary to the protestations of Fiona Millar and her gang, acting rationally.)
* Higher teacher salaries have a greater impact on learning outcomes than smaller class sizes. This suggests that we should employ fewer teachers and pay them more.
* In the countries near the top of the PISA league tables, such as Finland and Korea, teachers are drawn from the top 10% of graduates.

Tags: Andy Burnham, OECD, PISA