To think that British school children doing badly in the PISA tests is not the fault of UK teachers

[ReallyTired]

When England/ Wales/ Scotland/ Northen Ireland do badly in the PISA comparisions I think we are too quick to blame our teachers. I feel that if teachers decided had more say in educational policy then our results would rise. however teachers can only do so much. Our kids are lazy compared with much of the world. Parents have a responsiblity for their children's education.

Countries like Singapore, South Korea do well in the PISA tests because the children work so damnn hard and are tutored outside school. I think that private tutors are responsible for the children doing well rather than state education in Singapore or Korea.

My DP actually spent a year in South Korea teaching English to school kids. Safe to say, having seen it first hand, it is not a childhood he wants for our daughter.

Very happy to have lazy kids here.

It seems to me completely pointless to say it's the fault of teachers. Suppose we agree (and I don't, by the way) that British teachers are rubbish. Whose fault is that? Who is in charge of training teachers, recruiting teachers, paying teachers, monitoring and inspecting teachers? The teaching profession exists in a context and, if teachers are performing badly then you need to change the context - recruit better teachers, offer them better training, provide a decent inspection regime and good continued professional development.

It would be really interesting in British Private schools sat the pisa tests.
Private school kids do have a life and don't work 12 hours a day. They also have smaller classes and more teach automony just like Finland.

Prehaps the children should also sit a CATs test to see how a child with a low IQ in Japan does compared with a child with a low IQ in England. Some countries filter out special school kids.

meditrina I don't understand your objection to that comment. Teachers' jobs depend on them teaching a particular curriculum so they teach that curriculum.

You then want to blame them for not teaching a different curriculum?

poverty of aspiration

The elephant in the room. America has anti-intellectualism in its public life, with a significant proportion of the electorate in the flyover states, in particular, sceptical about education, especially higher education. That is why Bush (43) had to pose as a hick. He certainly wasn't a potential Nobel Prize winner, but he went to Yale and Harvard Business School, and the aw-shucks just-plain folks thing was an act. His father, Bush (41) was able to hide behind his distinguished war record, which meant no-one noticed that he'd graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale.

We don't have that. It's generally seen as a good thing that our politicians are mostly educated, cultured people and David Cameron and Tony Blair didn't have to pretend to have left school at 15 in order to get elected (Brown kept his PhD quiet, interestingly). But in some parts of our society, there is a massive "know your place", "getting above yourself", "why do you want to do that?" thing about education, and that's inter-generational. People who had negative views of education, and see it as both pointless and unenjoyable, pass that to their children. How you deal with that is really hard, but it's certainly not present-day teachers' fault.

Also worth being aware that these tests are such a big deal to the emerging economies in SE Asia - the students there are coached and prepare for the PISA tests. Ours are not, so you're not really comparing like with like. Also, China actually enters as 3 city states, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Beijing, carefully selecting the students that sit the tests. China has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the world, if you take the country as a whole, so they very carefully manage these tests, in a way we don't in the UK.

Also worth being aware that these tests are such a big deal to the emerging economies in SE Asia

Indeed. One of the things that makes educational policy such a minefield is that naive enthusiasts trumpet the merits of some particularly system that suits their political hobbyhorses. The left like Finland, because it is Scandinavian and they like that girl in the sweater and Ikea and their dad had a Saab. The right like Singapore because it's hard work and authority and discipline and casual racism. In most cases, they pay no attention to the confounders, that the societies are very different, that the assessment is very different, that the politics are very different. They just say "Finland is great, we should be more like Finland" (well, without 20% of the country voting for a nakedly blood and soil nationalist party whose policy on immigration makes the BNP look like milk and water liberals and were until recently known as "The Pure Finns" party, because they're not the sort of Scandinavians with sweaters and Saabs and pine furniture we like). Or they say "Singapore is great" and ignore the fact that it's in every way so totally unlike a European social democracy it's hard to know where to begin.

Look at the questions here:

www.oecd.org/pisa/test/form/

For the last one only 3% of 15 year olds in the UK got it right! Granted most of the other developed countries had similar rates, but it is quite concerning how few pupils can get a relatively simple question like that correct.
I don't know how to improve maths in kids, but given that we don't have a big manufacturing sector like we used to it is imperative that we have a highly skilled workforce. Otherwise companies will choose other countries for inward investment when setting up R & D departments, which would be a massive shame.

For the last one only 3% of 15 year olds in the UK got it right!

It's a fiddly "maths" question that's actually quite tricky to access (hence the low rates for other countries too) because it's really testing literacy and comprehension. The actual maths (if it takes you 15 minutes to ride 7km, how far can you go in an hour?) is easy, but it's wrapped up in a lot of verbiage, and verbiage that is different in style and tone to GCSE.

That's not the last question Friday - the last one is about the rotating doors which is pretty basic multiplication even for a numerically challenged tit like me.

SaucyJack
Have to agree - I have taught in Asia and whilst the students are a delight (disciplined and hardworking) it can be a soul destroying experience to see young people conditioned to compete from such a young age.
It isn't about instilling a life long love of learning or fostering creativity - it is about qualifications and employability.
Miserable.

The rotating doors question isn't the last one harticus

We test more than ever in this country and yet standards are falling in education so that surely tells us something is going wrong with the infra-structure of education.

I am an English teacher with 15 years experience and do think that the amount of meddling by the government in that time has not helped the situation at all. However I would argue it's not just government policies, changing of exams whilst students are in the middle of a course or the use of Ofsted to destroy schools which has led to the demise of educational standards: instead it is the changing face of society.

When I began teaching in 1998 students had to (largely) obey the teachers and if they didn't they were punished, sent home and then ultimately removed from the school permanently. Today schools can not do that so easily (except independent schools) because so many exclusions trigger an Ofsted inspection and the stress this incurs is horrific; head teachers are keen to avoid this at all costs. So schools have their hands tied.

There is also the rise of the "I know my rights!" brigade - students and their parents who object to after school detentions, reprimands, being removed from lessons for disruptive behaviour and being placed into an isolation unit for a period of time. Classes are full of kids who argue back about their rights with the support of their parents and this is both tiring and disruptive to the whole lesson.

What we need is a system where the school is the boss, where parents and children understand their responsibilities as well as their rights and if they don't like it they leave. I have taught in both the independent and state sector and would argue the main difference is supportive parents. When the parents support the school and want the teachers to get the best from their children; when they insist little Johnny's work needs to be neater or more detailed; when they demand that more of an effort is made by their child then and only then will standards improve.

We don't have a culture of aspiration in many schools not because the teachers don't have high expectations for their pupils but because many parents don't value the education their child receives. If this is the prevailing attitude from home then how will the child toe the line, work hard and achieve in school?

I think this is the first place to begin with improving education. It has to begin with the overriding attitude the pupil brings to school. After that I think it's down to ensuring the curriculum is suitable for all children to access (both academic and practical) and lastly trusting teachers to get on and teach the children they are in charge of.

I do think some teachers aren't great (as in all professions and industries) and I would happily see them asked to leave the profession as we have a duty to our young people. However I have also seen many talented teachers broken by a system which places the rights of the pupil (they have the right to disrupt, be aggressive towards the teacher and ultimately destroy the lessons) above the rights of the teacher and so as a profession we have lost many good practitioners.

Sorry - a long rant. If you got to the end without falling asleep I think you did well!

Apologies - can't even work my way round the sodding website.

I'm a maths teacher, and having had a look at those sample PISA questions, the reason that UK kids are doing so badly at them is because they are nothing like what they are being faced with at school.
friday is right to point out those questions are very wordy, they are as much a test of comprehension as they are of maths. Maths GCSE tests maths, not literacy, so the questions have been very much 'solve this quadratic, plot this graph'.
There have been moves in recent years to test these sorts of 'real life' questions with the inclusion of functional maths in GCSE. The kids tend to score poorly on these questions too, although some progress was being made to adapt teaching towards them. With Gove's new GCSE's coming in in 2015, I'm not sure what sort of format the questions will take, but with the substantially increased syllabus and even more abstract content, and the likelihood that teaching time will not increase to account for this, the sort of time-consuming thoughtful lessons that this sort of question needs is even less likely to be on the menu.

You surprise me KingRollo. If I was paying for DD's education I would expect her to be given more homework to do, after all that is what I would be paying for.

You need to pass entrance exams to go to the private schools round here. Much as they want our money the schools also like to have the results so that they can entice rich parents with academically able children. If a child is academically unable then they won't get in, no matter how much money their parents have.

That's not the last question Friday - the last one is about the rotating doors which is pretty basic multiplication even for a numerically challenged tit like me.

That certainly wasn't the last one I was presented with. The last one was a reprise of Helen and her bike, this time making a two-leg journey, and it had the low pass rate for most countries that had been alluded to.

Problems with the pisa tests are
They are not supposed to be used for league tables (pisa has said this)
The tests do not take in to account of where in the curriculum the pupils are.
Politicians, newspapers, general media and idiots have little or know understanding of how they should be used and spout bollocks.

I would love to know how the UK compares with the Asian countries in other childhood measures - ie happiness, etc. I know we do badly compared to other European countries, but I haven't seen any comparisons to Asia. I think having well rounded HAPPY children is just as important as high scores on specific tests...

wordy questions in maths, that's not fair!

brilliant