Chris Husbands. 
For any country, doing well in education league tables is – frankly – a mixed blessing. It attracts a good deal of international attention, and in theory it means that your young people should be better prepared for the labour market than those from less successful countries – although all of this depends on human capital theory being right, which it may well not be.
Your ministers of education can look forward to building their air miles points. On the other hand, success can make it more difficult to address underlying problems and challenges – the policies which got you to the top may well not be those which sustain high performance, and, depressingly, you can look forward to being misrepresented and (more…)