When Michael Gove became education secretary in 2010, the UK’s scores in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), which compares education attainment across 38 developed countries, were “at an all-time low”, said The Times. Gove used the data to “argue for urgent reforms” and introduced a new curriculum in England that emphasised core subjects.
Since then, the UK’s 15-year-olds have “climbed global rankings” in literacy and numeracy; they are now ninth among OECD peers for reading (up from 20th) and 11th for maths (up from 22nd). In the most recent Pisa assessment, the UK’s scores were all “above the OECD average”.
But Andy Burnham’s new education secretary, Lucy Powell, has blamed Gove’s school reforms for Britain’s youth worklessness crisis. Powell argues the “over-focus on academic outcomes” has “left too many young people behind”, said Gove in The Times, whereas “the truth is precisely the opposite”. Powell suggests she will overhaul the curriculum to focus on less academic subjects. “In other words: bring back stupid.”
‘Genuine’ success
I’m not saying England’s education system is “perfect,” said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. But “the focus on a knowledge-rich curriculum” has led to “better outcomes for most pupils”. The proportion of children getting good GCSEs has “continued to climb”, but grade inflation has remained “relatively low”. England’s school system is a “genuine public policy success of the last 25 years”.
And the improvements “have been seen across the board”, said Amanda Spielman, former chief inspector of Ofsted, in The Spectator: for children who are both less and more academic, for disadvantaged and advantaged. There is “plenty of space” within the curriculum for teenagers to “take up technical and vocational subjects” – we have some excellent courses and qualifications on offer. But there is “nothing wrong” with expecting all pupils to study the core subjects too, “as would be normal in the countries whose technical education systems we look to and admire”.
Many people believed Gove’s “deeply unpopular” reforms were a “big step backwards”, said The Economist. But countries that “pressed on with more fashionable approaches” have seen their scores fall. Experts “downplay the importance of learning crunchy stuff”, but “more tedious methods” appear to “get better results”. The data comparing us to other developed nations gives us “good reason to think that England’s reforms are starting to bear fruit”.
‘Partial’ success
Comparisons with international averages disguise a “decline in national educational attainment”, said The Times. Our actual scores have “hardly risen”. England is outperforming Scotland and Wales, which “took a different approach to reform”, but overall the UK’s latest Pisa figures for science have dropped 14 points compared with 2009. Maths has dropped three, and reading has remained the same.
It’s the declines among OECD peers that have “pushed the UK’s schools up the rankings”. According to the OECD, the pandemic “caused attainment to drop globally”, which reduces the ability of the Pisa scores to “serve as an accurate barometer”.
And ultimately, “success is more than educational attainment”. According to the Education Policy Institute, UK students have “the second lowest average life satisfaction of 15-year-olds across all OECD countries”.