We've done crap again in the international education league.

[mrswarbouys]

Leading to lots of talk on radio today with politicians spouting their lofty rhetoric and pointless statistics. What I'd like to know is what do people believe could be the reason why we're doing so badly?

fair enough...

Some really misinformed views on kids/people from Asia here

We can't hide behind our 'wacky creativity' - its just not facing the facts.

Also many many people from India and Korea are just as gifted creatively as they are in business as some have mentioned here, thank goodness.

sadsometimes and your opinions are based on? Mine are based on living in China and talking to people whose children are in the local systems, or indeed who have chosen to send their children to western schools because of their dissatisfaction with the local system. It is also the result of studying and working with people who have been through the Hong Kong and Chinese systems and really do find it hard at first when called on for opinion and ideas. We have had kenlee comment on here from Hong Kong who has sent his children to school here. Most of the Hong Kong and Shanghai elites send their children through some form of western education, granted it is partly a matter of status, and reflects the importance placed on making the right contacts but it is also very much a result of not wanting their children in a system that traditionally (with cultural roots going back hundreds of years in the Imperial exam system) values rote learning over critical and creative thinking. Of course human beings being human beings, people adapt to new working and social environments and develop the necessary skills in other ways. I cannot comment on India who in any case did not take part in the PISA tests.

In any case as an earlier commenter highlighted you cannot detach an education system from it's cultural roots. What works in China for Chinese Society, where hierarchies and the importance of informal networks of influence (guanxi) means business works in more organic ways, and the skills that are important in that environment, entrepreneurial and networking skills tend to be learnt outside of formal education (though still from birth), would not necessarily work in our culture (though of course as has been debated on here informal networks matter a lot more than most people will admit). In any case there is also a whole different and interesting debate on how the difference in our written languages, our structurally complex but alphabetical language versus one that is grammatically quite simple (little us of tenses, context is used instead) but requires the learning of literally thousands of characters which uses a different sort of memory.

Plus of course I am quite sure the PISA tests were developed and implemented "organically" too! for a start they were only implemented in Shanghai and Hong Kong.....

Sorry my ipad keeps making inappropriate use of exclamation marks....

I think both views are valid though, e.g. the view of someone looking at and deeply understanding an education system and someone looking at what it produces at the end. Of course education systems are not the only factor in a person's outcome, but surely the habit of hard work, skills development (of whatever type) and high expectations on oneself are skills that can be portable in whatever environment/cultural set up.

I think the truth lies somewhere in between, it isn't so much about what type of education a child receives and in which cultural context, but much more about what sort of expectations are placed on them by society (family, school, etc) and how much someone is used to sitting down to learn/work.

There is a crisis in large groups of western youths, where they are so shrouded in cotton wool, they can't get tired, they can't get cold/wet/upset/stressed/disappointed/pushed/reprimanded, we are too overprotective towards our young and as an employer I can really see the result in their (lack of) attitude towards hard graft. Many young people just believe that with minimum effort they will waltz in and earn 50k, they will not listen to what is required and have quite an entitled/arrogant attitude.

There are some very notable exceptions of course, from all walks of life, I have met some amazing young people coming through, but when we have started recruiting from Asia in general we haven't found the same issues at all and you can perceive the absolute willingness to work hard even at interview stage - maybe it isn't down to their education system, maybe it's just down to their family environment or a mix of both.

Something that rang true for me in the Amy Chua book, was that Chinese parents see strength in their DC and western parents too often see weakness.

Here on MN and in RL I'm often at how over protective and defensive so many parents are. They assume their DC are going to crumble at the least problem. They want their DC's lives to be a twinkly round of magic and glitter...

Then they wonder why their DC are toddler-like in their late teens.

It would be entirely wrong to underestimate the value of encouraging critical thinking and creativity in our schools. As my DD's Head says perhaps knowledge has been devalued in our system eg in History GCSE text books but there is a real danger it will be now given a priority at the expense of the importance of critical thinking that will see the pendulum swing too far the other way. It would be a great shame if in so doing we lost the competitive advantage in international job and education markets that that has given us. At it's best our education system is one of the best in the world and attracts students from across the world. Where it is weak is the equality of opportunity (which is still well ahead of China where if you do not have the money, schools are more expensive in rural areas, and, in the city, official right of residence, then you have no access to education at all, only 80% of children attend primary and middle school) It is initiatives like the London challenge which rely on improvement of leadership and processes, and sharing of best practise by the education professionals that have been shown to deliver that improvement in outcomes not wholesale tinkering with the curriculum and the exam system ( which most professional agree will worsen outcomes for students from poor backgrounds)

laine my DDs friend returned from a (very good ) British system international school to a Finnish school at 11. What really stood out for her was that there was little testing but that the teacher had the freedom and time (they only teach in the classroom for part of the working day, the rest is for preparation) to tailor the education to the individual. She was well ahead of the rest of the class but she was encouraged to continue developing at her pace without any sort of formal testing of levels for the whole class. She didn't sit an exam until 17. She is now at LSE. I am not sure where the stress creeps in?

wordfactory I haven't read Amy Chua's book, but following on from what shooting was saying I was going to say just that...

I don't see it as just being the parents though, I see it as the schools, our society, our whole culture. I think shifting the focus to what our children can do and building on that is key to the whole thing, because I truly don't believe that there are children who can do nothing.

However, a 'one size fits all' education system will not work in that context. It isn't about not stressing the little darlings (though I do have issues with starting formal education very early), it's about recognising that children develop at different rates. All you have to do is look at the way reading develops - some children will be fluent readers with good comprehension at age 5, for others it does not 'click' until they are 7. That doesn't mean you give up on the ones who get there later, it means you develop teaching strategies that will support them in reaching their as yet untapped potential.

The big problem we have is that the lowest achievers do not "click" at all, Pointy. Many cannot access the secondary curriculum so never catch up their peers. The reason why we are lower than we should be in the tables is that we have about 20% underachieving. (See article in the Times yesterday). If we could put more resources into early nursery places, one to one teaching, parental responsibility, etc we may be able to raise the lower attaining figure to only 5% as in other countries. This would give us a completely different ranking. We know we have this stubborn group of underachievers but all we hear about is grammar schools! Our best children are as good as those anywhere in the world.

Absolutely right, MillyMollyMama and one of the people behind the report highlighted just that - our top achievers do very well, but we have a larger body of low achievers than other countries and they pull down the average. Early nursery places, one to one teaching and assistance for parents are all good, but I think we need more - we need to make UK society less unequal.

Part of that is making work pay more - especially low paid work. We will always have low paid work, there are just jobs that need doing. How do you motivate someone to go out and take up a job that's a first step on the ladder when they know damn well they are going to end up financially worse off (mainly because of the cost of childcare) than they are not working? Investing in excellent affordable childcare is a win-win - good for the children, good for the parent. Alongside that I'd also like to see the length of parental (not: maternity) leave that means very young babies don't have to go into childcare. Don't get me wrong, mine were in nursery from 6 months and they thrived, but 1) not all childcare settings are the same and 2) not all children are the same.

It's complicated and there are no easy solutions to the stubborn problem of underachievement in the UK. I do know that importing the Asian culture of relentless study is not going to work here, and that I don't want the suicide rates that accompany that culture.

We need greater analysis to find out who is underachieving and why. I have a feeling affordable childcare is not the answer as the parents with lower achieving children may not be the parents who would use it unless they were forced to. Are these children really from parents who are desperate to be in the workforce? I suspect many are not. Just because a parent is not working, does not mean a child is underachieving either so whilst affordable childcare meets some needs, it is a case of making sure all the children likely to under-perform are given extra care/opportunities so they do not get so far behind.

Interestingly, there is increasing concern in Sweden that parents have lost parenting skills due to childcare being available cheaply to everyone. They are worried about teen behaviour as parents increasingly expect the state to bring up their children due to the long hours Swedish children spend in child care settings. Be careful what you wish for is the message from Sweden!

When I was working I chaired a committee of social workers, nursery teachers, educational psychologists, early years specialists, and health professionals to allocate children places in our nursery schools earlier than normal. This was based on need, home situation, achievement of milestones etc. The places were free. My area was pretty "leafy lane" but we had lots who needed the places. I can also tell you that many of the families trying to bring up these children were totally chaotic. They were not wanting affordable childcare. They were needing a total overhaul of their lives. This is the sort of intervention we need. Targeted, specific, high quality and designed to make a difference.

you cannot detach an education system from its cultural roots

agree, nor can you detach it from the economy. The UK is still above average for science and that's where we are seeing innovation. We no longer have the manufacturing base of the Far East or European countries like Poland which have kept those economies out of recession. If the UK is standing still (or just keeping up but not overtaking), but there is a divided educational picture regionally, it's reflecting the divided economic picture.

Just heard the debate on Question Time. Well done Mary Beard. The only person who had bothered to investigate the questions asked in these tests.

All I can say is that I allowed my daughter to attend a local Hong Kog school with all the pressures attatched. Yes that also meant a lot of rote learning and alot of extra out of school tution. I suspect the reason why the Shanghai and Hong Kong kids have better results are because they are tutored.

My daughters British school is quite good and the quality of education is outstanding. She now preforms well not because of tutoring which she has no access too but because of a desire to do well. I think her formative years of rote learninng has helped her to assimilate knowledge quickly..

She has now been taught to think analytically. Which gives her the best of both worlds. As for contacts I think we should be ok on that front. So the school doesnt really need to provide that for us.

So NO I dont think all British schools are crap....

Been working in Education in Vietnam for the past 20 years.

Good to see Vietnam join these rankings and as suspected they have done very well in the maths and sciences. Not sure how they measure reading skills as Vietnamese is totally phonetic, with very simple grammar and a very small vocabulary so any Vietnamese native speaker who goes to school for a few years can obviously read Vietnamese well.

I have never seen a Vietnamese person look up a Vietnamese word in a dictionary. My Vietnamese is not that good, but if there is an English word I don't know then I can often understand it if I am given the Vietnamese equivalent, as Vietnamese words are much simpler to understand.

Obviously they are measuring your skill rather than how difficult it was to achieve that skill.

Vietnamese are highly critical of their education system and they regard the British and American education systems as being vastly superior to their own.

Vietnamese kids study a huge amount and have no time for anything else so most city kids don't know anything that is not in their school curriculum. There curriculum puts a lot of focus on maths and science and gives very little input in the arts, sports, music, etc.. It seems as if the PISA tests were specifically designed for them. Even though the PISA tests suggest Vietnamese students know a lot, I regard Vietnamese as being intelligent, but ignorant.

Believe it is Education New Zealand that says something like, "Education is what you have left when you have forgotten everything you have been taught". By this definition, the Vietnamese education system is seriously lacking.

I feel kids in the UK study too little (or at least waste too much of their spare time on rubbishy activities) and kids in Vietnam study too much. Also feel that what the UK needs to improve its results is parents that are more involved in their children's education, and more emphasis put on getting, training and retaining better teachers.

Shootingatpigeons Thu 05-Dec-13 12:25:05
Hong Kong and Chinese systems and really do find it hard at first when called on for opinion and ideas.
I come from an Eastern European country, but I know exactly what the poster means. An idea of an essay where you present a rounded and weighted opinion, with pros and cons, is very difficult to grasp for people in my culture. There is a set of "right" attitudes and everybody is just expected to uphold those. Here, thinking is more individualistic, people are not expected to conform to a particular attitude and are expected have their own ideas. Wrt to essay writing, you need to be able to present the argument against just as well as the argument for something. The valid arguments against is something my culture would struggle with, people are not expected to go against the society's values and attitudes, so naturally find it difficult.

Too often, rather than voicing what YOU think, eastern students would wonder what are they supposed to think? How SHULD this question be answered? It is the culture and this is a lot more powerful than any education.

I remember as a teenager still back home, I was struck by how a group of Americans debated an issue. They had VERY different opinions, but the was no hint of "my opinion is better than yours", they valued and respected any of the opinions on the table. Each person's standpoint was as valid as anybody else's. And the presumption was there was no right or wrong way to think. This is just so foreign in my native culture. Everybody knows what is the right way to think and to behave and people are expected not to deviate from that. This is little to do with education, it is culture.

However, regarless of the considerations above, there is no excuse not to know your times times or not being able to do mental arithmetic with 3-digit numbers. Culture is irrelevant here, it is pure ignorance.

That's fascinating vietnammark

I agree kids in the UK study too little. I often see kids walking home from state school at 2.30, seems such a waste of the day! But mine are at private school so have long holidays, but their school day runs from 8.30 - 4.30 then sport until 6 plus Saturday school

Blueberry: I can really see the result in their (lack of) attitude towards hard graft. Many young people just believe that with minimum effort they will waltz in and earn 50k, they will not listen to what is required and have quite an entitled/arrogant attitude.
Yes, I see that too. And as soon as the young realise that an awful lot of hard work is needed to get even £20K, they just lose heart altogether and get despondent. Why bother, it is too much, it is too difficult. No point trying if it means they will have to wait 15 years for that £50K salary. Waiting is just not an option. Really a regretful attitude.

zooweemumma a couple of state schools around here start at 8am and finish at 2.30pm but then they have shorter holidays than private schools. Df has children in a school who runs similar to your dc and they have 3 months off for summer holidays 6 weeks of at christmas and at least a month off at Easter and 2 weeks instead of the usual 1 week for half term. Equally dd goes to a particular school that only operates the academic curriculum on 3 days per week. They all have high pass rates in GCSE's so I do not think more school time is necessarily making a lot of difference.

MIllyMollyMamma I don't think targeting nursery education is the answer. I think it is more about some children not being ready to learn until later on. My son was not ready at 4 to go to school to learn stuff even though he had attended a really nice nursery before hand. It went completely over his head. He described his teacher as a woman who stands at the front going blah blah blah and the highlight of his day being when he played out with his friends and in the afternoon he played Lego.

If he had started to learn in year 2 then I really think I would not have had to home ed him to bring him up to a certain standard. I shudder to think what would have happened if I had been unable to home ed. I think this is where the problems lie. By the time my ds came round to the idea that he was ready to learn the teaching system effectively turned round and said TOO LATE.

As I have said before you only have to look at a class in reception and year 1 and 2 where they place them in sets to see that the majority of boys are at this stage are in the bottom set. The only way out appears to be hire a tutor (around here that is £50 per hour) or home ed and leave the system all together.

I teach in a leafy suburb secondary school. Our underachievers tend to be lazy and entitled. Ime there are two types of underachievement in the UK

Those who don't value education and don't care. However, they could achieve with the right type of education for them.

Then there are those who are lazy and entitled. I do believe this is a harder nut to crack, and a very different type of student to the one above.

summerworld you clearly read my post of Wednesday at 12.30. I don't know my times tables. So I find your comment offensive. In common with 10 % of the population I have problems with working memory but I am far from ignorant. I can however access them with varying degrees of speed depending on various strategies, I ate and I eat and was sick on the floor gets me to 88 and then mental arithmetic can get me into the murky world of the 7s and 8s. The 10 less the number gets me to 9* etc. etc. etc. I do hope what you mean is that all young people should be equipped with the maths they need for everyday life, buying a carpet etc. and that will be a base for the further maths they may need in academic or business life.

I went to a very traditional grammar school, they really didn't know what to do with me. They knew I was clever but frustratingly never showed it in any test environment where there were time limits, their conclusion was that I was lazy and didn't put the time into learning my work though I did *2 . Luckily we had a Maths teacher who believed that understanding the logic was more important than getting the answers right and drummed it into us at a speed every member of the class could keep up with and repeated it again and again until we did. She was a quiet mouse, not at all a charismatic inspirational teacher but I often mentally thank her for departing from the chalk and talk, rote learning to test norm of teaching in the school. Now if I need to understand the demand curve for work I may not exactly recall the formulae or method, may even have never been formally taught the more advanced methods but I can access the logic behind calculus and get there.

As I said in my post using a variety of teaching styles and judging outcomes in a way that is not dependent on rote learning are important to ensuring that all pupils are enabled not to be ignorant.

Shooting, I am sorry if I offended you. Your case does sound rather extraordinary. The majority of your class would have been absolutely fine with a bit of rote learning, same as the majority in any school. Yes, by all means, it helps to know and understand the logic, but it takes an awful lot longer to go through the chain you have described than recall 3*7=21 from memory. As somebody who had taught several dyslexic pupils, I am well aware that their literacy problems had nothing to do with being thick, rather not being able to respond in the same way to the teaching methods majority of pupils are perfectly OK with. Nevertheless, if a method works for the majority, why discount and rubbish it? Your case is not all that common, rather very uncommon indeed.

shooting Im rather happy that you went to a good grammar and was picked up by a very good teacher.

I am sure all British schools and most British students can always identify with a teacher who had helped them and mentor them. Who would spent time with their pupils and not just the bright ones who get the results.

That is British schooling getting the child to fulfill their potential. To be the very best they can be. Often agaisnt great odds. Its not only about results it about how yiu face the world.

I know I have local hk and foreign workers. I use them to their strengths. The hard graft is done by the locals because once told how they are quick and accurate. Something foreign workers seem unable to do. Thinking is mostly done by foreign workers as they think out of the box. The locals akways say it has always been done this way.

I prefer my daughter to be a thinker but with a good grounding in rote learning.....I do think both can go hand in hand

MillyMollyandMax. It is completely unrealistic to think that our underachieving 20% could be home educated because they are not ready for school. The whole purpose of nursery education is to prepare for learning. We know we have very many parents who are unable to prepare their children to learn, whether that is at 4, 5 or a bit older. I agree that some children do take a bit longer and then catch up but we also know that a very large number do not. They are not from home ed type families, are they? So, our choice should be, as a nation, to intervene early. Boys were not all in the bottom set where my children went to school by the way. This is stereotypical and just plain wrong. Why would you assume a boy would not be ready to learn along with his peers? This just does not happen in many other countries. No-one is saying it is too late to learn and catch up but, there is overwhelming evidence that we have very many children who never catch up, gain adequate qualifications or will ever be employable.