Image credit: Africa Studio via Adobe Stock.

1 April 2023

By John Jerrim

Online fraud is very serious business. We are faced with it every day. Indeed, as I am writing this blog, I’ve just received an email from a prince from a far-off-land who has an “exciting” business opportunity he wishes to discuss with me…….

I’m sure you have all received such emails as well: it is estimated that around 3.4 billion spam emails are sent every day. But how many young people are actually at risk of being duped by such a primitive digital scam?

Given that in many countries today it’s April Fools’ Day, essentially a day where we celebrate gullibility, let’s take a look. (more…)

23 February 2023

By John Jerrim

Once upon a time, when Michael Gove was Secretary of State for education, PISA was all the rage (for the uninitiated, PISA is the Programme for International Student Assessment, which compares the performance of 15-year-olds across nearly 100 countries in reading, mathematics and science). As I noted at the time, international evidence was then en vogue, with PISA in particular featuring prominently in education debates. But is PISA now receiving less attention than it use to? In a new academic paper, I take a look… (more…)

Credit: Phil Meech for UCL.

11 January 2023

By Andy Green and Neil Kaye 

If nothing else, Sunak’s recently announced plan for all students in England to study Maths to age 18 generated a rich crop of maths related puns in the media. Our analysis shows the plan should be welcomed, at least in principle, as a long-overdue reform – but also how implementing such a policy without the requisite strategic and financial backing would likely lead to wider skills gaps and a worsening of the inequalities already seen amongst young people leaving upper secondary education.

England is amongst a small minority of OECD countries which do not require the study of either Maths or the national language throughout upper secondary education (ages 16-18) (the others being Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the other UK nations). Furthermore, less than half of students in post-16 education study Maths as a discreet subject, many of them instead on courses to re-take GCSE Maths, in which only 20 per cent passed at grade (more…)

Chris Husbands.
One of the universities I worked in ran an advertising campaign for which the strapline was ‘It’s not the letters after your name that matter: it’s the name after your letters’. At the time, it attracted a good deal of criticism from within the university. This was reducing higher education to a mere positional good, placing value on the degree only in terms of its relative value against other universities. It was the language of competition and league tables, not the language of the intrinsic worth of higher education.
(more…)

Rose Luckin
The 200 page report published this week by the OECD is packed with tables and figures that tell a story about the state of 15-year-olds’ educational attainment in maths, reading, science and digital skills in 2012 across the participating countries.
The negative message from this report has received considerable publicity: countries that have invested heavily in ICT for education do not show improved student achievements in reading, mathematics and science. Less use of the internet is linked to better reading performance and frequent use of technology in school is linked to lower performance. The UK did not participate in this study, but findings being presented to the British Educational Research Association today (Thursday) appear to back it up.
All this sounds very depressing, but it is not the key message we should take away from the report. Instead we should be (more…)

John Jerrim.
About six months ago I released a paper discussing the reason for East Asian success in the OECD PISA survey of 15 year olds’ skills and knowledge in reading, mathematics and science, focussing largely upon the role of home background and culture. I have been somewhat overwhelmed by the number of people who have shown an interest in this paper and who have contacted me about this work since. Today, I present some evidence on the other side of the story – the ‘impact’ of East Asian teaching methods on children’s mathematics test scores. (more…)

Chris Husbands
The news of a proposed re-make of Dad’s Army preceded by only a few days David Cameron’s announcement of a National Teaching Service: a ‘corps’ of ‘elite teachers’ to be deployed into ‘failing schools’ at short notice. Both depend on stereotypes too obvious for comment. If Bill Nighy was an all-too-predictable casting as Sergeant Wilson, it’s easy to imagine the images that a National Teaching Service might conjure.
In so far as it’s a good idea, I’ll claim some credit for it, since the idea of taking a more strategic approach to the deployment of teachers was one I developed at the beginning of 2013 in my contribution to The Tail. In so far as it is a bad idea as now developed, of course, I’ll distance myself from it, and note (for the avoidance of doubt, the next clause is dripping with irony) that it has lost something in the movement from elegant inception to (more…)

Chris Husbands
The party conference season is over and it is election-preparation time: before the end of the school year, voters will have gone to the polls and a new government will be in office. There are sharp choices to be made for all major parties: whether to offer consolidation, recognising the radical changes to curriculum, assessment and school structures introduced since the Academies Act of 2010, or to strike boldly out for more change. For the Conservatives, celebrating at their conference that more children now attend good and outstanding schools, there must be a temptation to consolidate, to build bridges with teachers and make Michael Gove’s legacy work, rather than unleashing yet more potentially disruptive change. For the Liberal Democrats, claiming credit for the pupil premium which offers schools additional resources for poorer pupils, the aim is both to ensure that they get the electoral credit for an imaginative approach to school funding and to identify a further totemic policy to carry forward. Perhaps choices are most acute for Labour: (more…)

John Jerrim
It is no secret that East Asian children excel at school. For instance, 78 percent of ethnic Chinese children obtain at least 5 A*-C GCSE grades, compared to a national average of just 60 percent. Yet, despite some very interesting qualitative work by Becky Francis, we still know very little about why this is the case.
I explore this issue in my new paper using PISA 2012 data from Australia. Just like their counterparts in the UK, Australian-born children of East Asian heritage do very well in school – particularly when it comes to maths. In fact, I show that they score an average of 605 points on the PISA 2012 maths test. This puts them more than two years ahead of the average child living in either England or Australia. They even outperform the average child in perennial top PISA performers like Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan.
(more…)

Ian Marcouse
One mis-selling scandal after another has highlighted how bad adults are at managing their own financial resources. They trust the wrong people and believe in the wrong advice. The ease with which payday lenders found customers shows the difficulty people have with APR (annual percentage rate) figures. Even taking out a current account is fraught with risk. For young people about to stack up a huge amount of debt at university, financial literacy is vital, if only to avoid their parents’ mistakes.
The UK Government sought to tackle the issue last year by announcing that financial literacy would become a compulsory part of England’s national curriculum – included both in mathematics and citizenship classes. This covers about half the state schools in the country – with academies and free schools allowed to opt out.
Unfortunately, new findings from the OECD suggest that there is virtually no correlation between the amount of time spent teaching financial literacy in classrooms and students’ ability to answer questions on the subject. Nor did it matter much whether financial literacy was taught by teachers of mathematics, economics/business or social sciences.
But could their analysis be misleading?
The OECD’s PISA programme administered a two-hour test to half a million students from 16 countries to try to assess young people’s financial literacy. These countries included the US and China, but not the UK.
The report, published this month, showed a very high correlation between PISA results for mathematics and those for financial literacy. Consequently China (Shanghai) came top by a large margin, while the USA performed below the 16-country average. Bottom came Colombia. According to the PISA findings the most important factor by far was how well the respondents had been taught mathematics.
But these results were not surprising, as the questions were strongly weighted towards numeracy (such as checking the accuracy of an invoice). An alternative explanation might be that this weighting made the correlation with maths results inevitable. If the questions had been focused on a critical approach to financial issues and products, the results may have been different.
The research looked at many variables that might determine student performance at financial literacy. It concluded that the amount of time spent teaching financial literacy had no effect. For example teachers in the United States spend a particularly long time on the topic – to no discernable benefit on test results. Furthermore the quantity of teacher training had little impact on the results. On average about half of all teachers of financial literacy had received some training on the subject – but to no avail. (The quality of the teacher training was not assessed.)
Other variables that proved unimportant included country GDP per capita, gender and social background. More important was direct experience: those with a bank account came out with higher scores than those without.
Specifically the PISA report says, in answer to the question: “What can be done to enhance financial literacy?”

• Having a bank account is a better predictor of financial literacy than anything you do in the classroom.
• Teaching financial literacy is a poor predictor of success at financial literacy in these tests
• Where financial literacy is taught as a separate subject (such as the USA) performance is not strong.
• Volume of exposure to financial education has no correlation with performance on the tests

From PISA’s viewpoint the findings are clear: teach mathematics in a more conceptual, abstract manner (as in Shanghai) and students will be in a better position to apply their understanding to real contexts. The question remains: is the extremely high correlation between maths and financial literacy simply a result of the construction of the tests? If so, policy makers should take great care about drawing conclusions from PISA’s exercise.
What was the purpose behind such a numerically-driven series of questions? There are many other factors in financial literacy, such as questions about past problems and scandals (Bernard Madoff; Charles Ponzi) plus the pyramid schemes that young adults can often be caught up in. There is the fundamental problem of asymmetric information, in which the seller of financial products knows so much more than the buyer. These issues were not addressed.
This leaves two possibilities: either teaching financial literacy is a waste of time (the PISA conclusion) or perhaps PISA did thorough research based on the wrong questions. In 2015 they will repeat the exercise (and may include Britain this time). Let us hope they think hard about whether they want to repeat the questions.