International Pisa education rankings show why Scotland needs to learn from England – John McLaren

As England’s education system is held up as an example to the world, Scotland’s performance has got worse despite substantially higher school spending per pupil

Just how bad has the slide in Scotland’s education performance post-devolution been? Pretty bad actually. But we don’t have to look far to find a country where lessons can be learnt – England. Last week’s Pisa report from the OECD on international school standards highlighted how Scotland’s have declined, in both absolute and relative terms.

The results are not simple to interpret, even before we get to any kind of ‘how did this happen?’ analysis. Across the OECD, the biggest losers since 2006 have been Finland, Iceland and the Netherlands, all experiencing falls, when combined across the three subjects covered – mathematics, reading and science – of well over 100 index points. Given that 20 points is supposed to account for around a year of education, that means an average loss of around two years in each subject for Iceland and the Netherlands and almost three years for Finland.

But each story if different. As Finland started off in 2006 as a world-leading nation, it remains in the top 20 for each subject and scores significantly higher than the OECD average. Whereas Iceland, which started out middling, has become one of the worst-performing OECD nations.

Rishi Sunak visits Harris Academy in Battersea, London, earlier this year (Picture: Henry Nicholls/WPA pool/Getty Images)

Other oddities in the rankings include the performance of ex-Soviet Bloc countries. While some, like Estonia and Latvia, are doing very well, others, like Romania and Bulgaria, are doing very badly. Equally, in the Middle East, wealthy countries like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have very poor education outcomes. What explains these trends? Far too many things that are far too little understood at present.

So let’s hone in on Scotland. After Finland, Iceland and the Netherlands, Scotland is in the next group of, long-term, poorly performing countries. While its reading results have only fallen a little, and by less than the OECD average, in mathematics and science the decline has been equivalent to around a year-and-a-half’s worth of learning, with both these falls worse than the OECD average.

Within the UK, while Wales suffered similarly in terms of science, Scotland stood alone in terms of its mathematics decline. Furthermore, the Scottish Government’s claim that our performance in science and maths is “near the OECD average” is only true because the exceptionally poor performances of newly admitted members Colombia and Costa Rica, and long-term laggards Chile and Mexico, are included in that average. Without them, the picture looks much bleaker.

The comparison with England is telling. Across all OECD countries, England’s performance is only bettered, in a statistically significant way, by Japan, Korea, Estonia and Canada, with Ireland possibly also a whisker ahead. Not only that but the UK (for which read England, given its weight and the poorer performance, in terms of average scores and basic proficiency levels, of the other three UK nations) is held up by the OECD as one of the best countries in terms of attaining both a strong overall performance and a high degree of equity in education. It states that others “can learn from solidly performing education systems that have high levels of inclusion and fairness, such as in Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Macao and the United Kingdom”.

So why have England’s fortunes improved while Scotland’s have worsened? It's not funding, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) recently calculated that school spending per pupil is 18 per cent higher in Scotland compared to England, a differential that has been growing over the past decade, not declining.

Policy probably does plays a role. In England there have been a series of dramatic changes over the last quarter of a century which have resulted in clear improvements – for example, the turnaround in London’s education standards – and the Pisa ranking rise.

In Scotland there have been long-standing concerns over the negative impacts of the introduction of the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE). As Professor Lindsay Paterson, of Edinburgh University, points out, the fact that reading, which can to a degree be taught at home, has held up, while science and maths have declined, strengthens this interpretation.

Policy in Scotland may have been well-intentioned but it may also have been poorly implemented. In general, politicians have been less confrontational with teachers over policy than south of the Border, but it doesn’t appear to have improved performance, rather the reverse. While UK Education Secretary Gillian Keegan’s claims of English superiority may be oversimplifying matters, nevertheless there seems to have been greater merit in the more challenging New Labour and Conservative education policies initiated post-devolution.

As in other areas, like the economy, a lack of real interest and substantial analysis may be at the root of the downward slide in education standards. A perfect example of this was the 2010 decision by the then Education Secretary Mike Russell to remove Scotland from the other two international education surveys, Timms and Pirls, now thankfully reversed. Another, the obsession with class sizes, has now been thankfully downplayed.

Why is all this important? It’s pretty obvious really. Improvements in the economy, well-being and equality are all driven, in large part, by rising educational standards, a point readily accepted by the Scottish Government and supposedly reflected in its policies and funding choices.

Turning this round will not be easy. It will take time. Most of all it will take a change in attitude and performance of the Scottish Parliament. Successive First Ministers, the governing parties, the committees are all culpable.

Fortunately, according to the expert and neutral analysis of the OECD, the government doesn’t have to travel as far as Korea or Estonia to unlock some of the secrets of a better education system, it need only look across the Border at what changes have worked there, or, at a pinch, over the sea to Ireland. Not too much to ask for, or perhaps it is.

John McLaren is a political economist who has worked in the Treasury, the Scottish Office and for a variety of economic think tanks