19 November 2019

By John Jerrim

When the PISA results are released every three years it is now little surprise when a set of east Asian nations (e.g. Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea) dominate the top spots in the rankings.

These nations typically substantially outperform most English-speaking western nations, with one important exception – Canada.

This is illustrated by the table below, which shows the top 20 countries in terms of average scores in reading, science and mathematics.

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12 November 2019

By John Jerrim

If anyone has ever read one of the international PISA reports or seen Andreas Schleicher present they will know that the OECD is rather fond of cross-national scatterplots. These illustrate the relationship between two variables measured at the country level.

Take, for instance, the chart below. This has been taken from one of Mr Schleicher’s blogposts, and illustrates the relationship between a country’s test scores and its rate of economic growth. It has been interpreted by the OECD as showing “that the quality of schooling in a country is a powerful predictor of the wealth that countries will produce in the long run”.

Source: Research by Hanushek and Woessmann, via the OECD Education and Skills Today blog

Sounds convincing, right?

The trouble is, correlation does not equal causation. And, despite the OECD’s obsession with such cross-country relationships, they can often deceive.

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5 November 2019

By John Jerrim

Every time PISA results are released, concerns are raised about the methodology that underpins the work.

One area that has come in for repeated criticism is how the test scores of students are actually produced, as in this article, which asked whether PISA was “fundamentally flawed”.

Such concerns were exacerbated by a seminal paper by Svend Kreiner and Karl Bang Christensen who claimed that their results indicated that using PISA to compare countries was “meaningless”.

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29 October 2019

By John Jerrim

When the reform to GCSEs was initially announced, under the watch of Michael Gove in 2014, the intention was to link performance on the new GCSE exams to the PISA test.

Now, as far as I am aware, this link between PISA and national examination standards has not been established. Instead we have the comparable outcomes policy [PDF] and the national reference test to ensure standards are comparable over time.

Yet the interesting question remains – how do the ‘currency’ of GCSE grades and PISA test scores translate?

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15 October 2019

By John Jerrim

In England we are fortunate to have a lot of data available about school pupils and how they are achieving academically at school.

Organisations such as FFT aim to make this data available and easily digestible to schools through services such as Aspire so that it can be used to inform the decisions of teachers and school leaders.

But how does the way schools in England make use of data compare to schools in other countries?

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8 October 2019

By John Jerrim

Since 2009, parts of China have been participated in the OECD’s triennial PISA testing.

In 2009 and 2012, Shanghai topped the international rankings and by quite some distance, with 15-year-olds in this Chinese city estimated to be up to two and a half years ahead of their counterparts in England.

Yet China’s participation in PISA also led to controversy. (more…)

17 September 2019

By John Jerrim

There have been lots of concerns raised recently about social media use among young people. This includes links found between time spent on social media and declines in mental health. Similarly, some are now likening constant internet use to an addiction, with teenagers suffering withdrawal symptoms if their smartphone is taken away.

But how frequently do young people in England access social media? Are they any more or less ‘addicted’ to the internet than young people in other countries? And does this supposed addiction to the internet really do their mental health any harm?

Evidence from the latest PISA data available may well hold some clues.

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20 June 2019

By John Jerrim

Five years ago, when results from the TALIS 2013 survey were released, there was one thing that particularly caught the attention of education policymakers, unions and school leaders – teacher workload. This study revealed how lower-secondary teachers in England had one of the longest working weeks anywhere across the world.

This subsequently led to a huge policy effort by the Department for Education to reduce teachers’ workloads. Amongst other things, this included setting up numerous workload review groups, reducing the data burden being placed upon schools and publishing advice and guidance to school leaders about how teachers’ workloads could be reduced.

Today, results from the latest wave of the TALIS survey (conducted in 2018) has been released. This provides the first real opportunity, using genuinely comparable data, to consider (more…)

20 June 2019

By John Jerrim

There has been a lot of talk recently about the harm caused by social media and that young people are experiencing ever-greater levels of cyber-bullying. These relatively new phenomena have implications for teachers and schools, who often have to intervene in cases of unwanted electronic contact and potentially harmful social media posts being shared about their pupils.

But is this really more of a problem in England than elsewhere?

New results from the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2018 study suggest that this may be the case. Yet, as always, the devil is in the detail. In a nationally representative survey, lower-secondary headteachers across more than (more…)

19 June 2019

By John Jerrim

Pay is a key concern of teachers in England. It is one of the key aspects of their employment conditions, with previous research suggesting that pay is closely linked to the recruitment and retention of teachers.

At the same time, teacher pay is an area where there has been a lot of change in recent years. Reforms were introduced in 2013 that reduced the link between teachers’ pay and their length of service, while also giving schools more freedom to set starting salaries. Moreover, up to 2018 the public sector pay cap was in place, limiting annual salary increases of teachers in England to one percent.

This then begs the question, how satisfied are teachers in England with their pay? Evidence from TALIS 2018  provides important new evidence on this issue. (more…)