UK pupils do better than expected – despite Covid
Some good news at last. Educational attainment in Britain did not suffer as sharp a decline as many other countries as a result of the pandemic, the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) tests suggest.
Although British students had lower scores in maths and reading than they achieved in 2018, they climbed the league tables in a sign that Britain managed education during the pandemic better than other countries in the OECD survey. The UK moved up to 12th place from 13th last time.
However, there was ultimately a drop in scores. In maths, from 2018, the scores fell from 502 in 2018 to 489 (13 points) and in reading, they fell from 504 to 494 (ten points). Pisa considers 20 points the equivalent of a year’s worth of education.
Pisa has been measuring global educational standards achieved by 15-year-olds every three years since 2002. The 2021 round of assessments was postponed because of the pandemic and instead carried out in 2022. Approximately 700,000 students sat the test, with 13,000 students from Britain taking part.
The UK’s average scores were kept higher by England’s better-than-average performance while there were worrying scores from Wales and Scotland. England moved up to 11th place from 27th in 2009 in maths – a huge and welcome leap despite the overall score falling. In Scotland specifically, a country which once led global educational league tables, there has been an 18-point drop in maths since 2018. Since 2006, there has been a 35-point drop in maths and a 32-point drop in science.
Some experts claim this decline in attainment is due to the SNP’s sweeping “Curriculum for Excellence” reforms which have placed a greater emphasis on wellbeing than knowledge. Lindsay Paterson, emeritus professor of education policy at Edinburgh University, said: “The amount of wellbeing instead of grounding in basic functions you see in Scotland is now showing in these catastrophic Pisa results.”
Despite the educational drop and being outperformed by Estonia, Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, was full of praise for England’s performance. She said: “These results are testament to our incredible teachers, the hard work of students and to the government’s unrelenting drive to raise school standards over the past 13 years.
“Taken together with our children being named ‘best in the west’ for reading earlier this year, England is now firmly cemented as one of the top performing countries for education in the western world.”
Andreas Schleicher, OECD education and skills director, emphasised an important difference between Britain and the highest performing countries: “High-performing countries, like Singapore, Japan, actually continue to improve results during the pandemic and that’s certainly not what you can say for the UK.
China topped the overall list, with Singapore and Estonia following close behind. Finland, normally held up as a beacon of excellence, came in eighth place behind Taiwan and Canada.
Surely the Covid Inquiry will be looking into the way these countries managed the pandemic and young people’s education to learn what we could have done better.
The Pisa figures, which also gauge many other aspects of young people’s educational lives, showed another worrying trend in the UK. Food poverty in our school-age children is on a par with Moldova and Mexico, with 11 per cent of young people saying they had skipped a meal due to financial constraints at least once a week.
Despite Gillian Keegan’s glowing report, there are major problems in the UK’s education system although these are starker in the devolved powers. Still, the decline from the tumult of the pandemic could have been much sharper, and in that, we should be cautiously optimistic.
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