John Jerrim.
Today, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) release results from the 2015 round of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Although the ‘country rankings’ take the headlines, there are many other (and often more interesting) findings once you scratch below the surface. In this blog2post, I provide a crash-course in ten other key findings for the UK from the latest wave of PISA data. For further details on any of these results, see the PISA 2015 national reports for England, Wales and Northern Ireland that I have co-authored.
1. Although average scores have remained stable in the UK, this masks some notable differences between the four countries over the last decade…
There has been no significant change in England’s average PISA score, in any subject, since 2006 (the first time point to which we can compare). However, average science scores have fallen by around 20 test points (two terms of schooling) in Wales, with a similar decline in mathematics scores between 2006 and 2015 in Scotland.
2. …but we shouldn’t (yet) read too much into the fall in science scores between 2012 and 2015
Undoubtedly, education in Scotland is likely to come under the microscope today, in part because of the pronounced decline in its 15-year-olds’ PISA science scores over a short (more…)