erman education is undergoing an unprecedented upheaval. Policy-makers and practitioners are embarking on a period of intense soul-searching in order to identify the causes of educational under-achievement, and come up with the right remedy.

The catalyst has been PISA - the Programme of International Student Assessment - developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The Germans were alarmed to see in the results of tests published last year that their performance was well below average in all three subjects - language, maths and science. The latest figures from the OECD, released last week, show that Germany has slipped from fourth to 12th in the international league for the proportion of pupils getting the equivalent of five good GCSEs.

Over the past decade, the OECD has been working on an enormous set of indicators which compares the education systems of its 30 member countries. PISA - a battery of tests for 15-year-olds - reported on student outcomes for the first time in late 2001.

Germany’s results, while a shock, were not entirely unexpected. The Germans had been sliding down the international pecking order for several years, but were waiting for the new Rolls-Royce PISA tests to see if they confirmed that their education system did have a problem.

It does. In maths, Germany came 19th out of 27 OECD countries. The figures for reading (20th) and science (21st) were no better. Even worse, the overall German result was an aggregate of the achievement of all its states (LAnder), which were strung out along a long continuum. In reading, for example, Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg in the south did best, with Bremen languishing at the bottom. The graph below shows Germany’s results compared with Canada - another federal country whose education system is structured along the same lines. Perhaps most shocking to the Germans was the fact that even their top-performing state, Bavaria, was only around the OECD average. And only Bavaria did better than Canada’s worst-performing province.

What is more, this wide range of achievement has serious political implications, since the German constitution states that living conditions must be the same all over Germany. This means that the quality of education children receive must not depend on where they live.

When asked, Germans give many different reasons for this unhappy state of affairs, and overall there is a sense of bewilderment and confusion. There have been official visits to Finland and Sweden to see what they are doing right. In a large, complicated system, made up of 16 states (Hamburg and Berlin were excluded from the PISA study for technical reasons) which jealously guard their autonomy and are of very different political persuasions, reform looks like being slow and difficult. “There is enormous inertia in the system,” says Professor Wolfgang Edelstein of the Max Planck Institute for Educational Research in Berlin.

Yet the politicians feel that there is no time to lose - since both national pride and economic competitiveness are at stake. So far, four big issues have been identified on which there is consensus: length of the school day, lack of common national standards and a core curriculum, inadequacies of nursery schooling, and classroom practices which do not take enough account of individual needs.

Although there are some all-day schools, most children only attend school in the morning. Policy-makers are convinced that a key reason for German children falling behind is that they have fewer hours of schooling. As a result, the government is offering four billion euros (more than pound;2.5bn) to the LAnder to help them develop all-day schooling.

There is also a consensus that Germany needs to develop common national standards, including a core curriculum. The key forum for working on this is the Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK) - the conference of the 16 education ministers, which meets four times a year. Last month the ministers agreed that national standards of what knowledge and skills should be achieved at a certain age, should be developed by the LAnder, and the information shared amongst them. And for the first time, nationwide comparative exams are to be established.

The third key issue is early years. The Germans invented the kindergarten, but they have lost confidence in their model, which emphasises social development rather than education. Each of the LAnder is developing policies to improve education, and most are boosting the academic content of nursery schooling. In Baden-Wuerttemberg, for example, an overhaul of the pre-school curriculum is a key plank of a whole raft of interlocking reforms which the state is putting into place. Annette Schavan, its minister for education, is a celebrated national figure. She believes language to be “the key in education”, and sees competence in German as a crucial skill, especially for ethnic-minority children. The PISA report showed that better language skills among young Germans would have made a big difference even to the maths results. So five-year-olds in Baden-Wuerttemberg will undergo a language test (borrowed from the Finns), and those who need it will be offered a support programme during the six months before they start school at the age of six.

erhaps most upsetting for the Germans has been the fact that of all OECD countries, Germany was the one where socio-economic background had most effect on student results. Sybille Volkholz, co-ordinator of the influential Heinrich-Boll commission which is planning key policy reforms, believes that educational debates have too often polarised into left and right-wing approaches to schooling, and not enough attention has been paid to the needs of individual children, or to effective classroom practices. “In Sweden,” she says, “schools see themselves as responsible for the achievement of their students. Here, they see themselves as responsible for the curriculum.”

As a result, most states are re-focusing on the needs of students. Brandenburg, in the North-east, intends to increase the “practical knowledge” of students so that they are better prepared for jobs, to involve more parents by establishing a parents’ room in every school, and to give disadvantaged pupils more support.

Inevitably, party politics complicates issues. Many of those on the left, for example, believe that the PISA results confirm the failure of Germany’s academically selective school system, but are resigned to the fact that nothing will be done to address such a hot political issue. The right remain firmly wedded to selection and streaming.

The fact that all policy has to be hammered out among the LAnder makes for slow progress. Germany’s states jealously preserve their “cultural sovereignty”, and are suspicious that the PISA debacle may result in more power going to the centre.

But there is no doubt that the Germans are conscientiously trying to unravel a host of influences and taken-for-granted pieties in their efforts to reconstruct and modernise their system - and there is a remarkable absence of buck-passing and recrimination. Professor Juergen Baumert of the Max Planck Institute said: “This misery has a lot of fathers and mothers.”