A question about international tests such as PISA.
The Coalition government appears to obsess about PISA to the exclusion of all else, and uses the results to paint a picture of a country undergoing rapid educational decline and in need of wholesale reform (I will gloss over the fact that our PISA candidates are nearly a calendar year younger than candidates in other countries when they sit the test, as we haven't got long).
The only problem with this line of Coalition rhetoric is that there are also other international tests where we tend to do really well, and from those results it is clear that we are consistently a top 10 country internationally in terms of education, and doing rather better than many of our Western European cousins. I am thinking about TIMSS (Trends in International Methods and Science Study) and PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study). These tests are different from PISA in that they assess the context of the curriculum (e.g. language) rather than just relying on factual recall, by the way.
Yet this achievement is consistently underreported by the Coalition. In the report about the 2011 PIRLS results, for example, it said this:
The top-performing countries in PIRLS 2011 were Hong Kong SAR, Russian Federation, Finland, and Singapore. In addition to the four Finland top-performers, Northern Ireland, the United Singapore States, Denmark, Croatia, and Chinese Taipei had high average achievement, followed by Ireland and England who also performed very well and rounded out the top eleven high- achieving countries. The US state of Florida and the Canadian province of
Ontario also did very well.
Glowing, right? yet this is how the DfE reported it to us at the time.
Results in key international tests in maths, science and reading demonstrate the urgent need for the government’s reforms, Education Minister Elizabeth Truss said today.
In a speech this morning, she said it was only when England’s education system matched those of the world’s leading performers that standards would rise for all children.
Now Nicky, I am not saying that we wouldn't all like to be able to strut around saying that England was Number 1 in the world, and so on, but all I can see from the results from PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS is that a) results have got slightly worse since the Coalition came into power (I am thinking of Science Fourth Grade results here) but that overall, despite the fact the Coalition has spent £8.35 billion earth pounds, we are pretty much trying to throw money at something that was in a reasonable state anyway.
So here's the question. Why don't we report all of these measures equally rather than privileging the findings of one test over others?