Two weeks ago I visited Germany to discuss with the Germans the shock they have experienced since their education system fared so badly in last year’s international comparisons from the Programme of International Student Achievement (PISA).
To most of the British, accustomed to admiring the German system, this has come as a big surprise. But even more surprising has been the realisation that we did so well in comparison with other industrialised countries. Our 15-year-olds came fourth out of 27 countries in science, and eighth in literacy and maths.
This triumph was, of course, well-publicised in The TES, got a mention in other newspapers, and is referred to by the Government whenever it sees an opportunity. But very few people outside education circles seem to be aware of it and - this is the really weird thing - most who have read about it prefer not to believe it. Where are the big analyses showing how our schools have improved? Nowhere. The Germans are astonished.
Of course, there is a predictable determination in some quarters to use any stick to beat the Government. The Daily Mail recently accused Tony Blair of boasting about Britain’s international success when everyone knows that the performance indicator used - A-levels - was fatally compromised and open to fiddling.
Apart from the fact that the manipulation which has been revealed has been downwards not upwards, the journalist seemed completely unaware that these comparisons are at age 15, not 18, and that far from using A-levels as the benchmark, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Develop-ment has spent years developing new international tests because their statisticians were dissatisfied with the ones which went before.
Not surprisingly, Chris Woodhead also believes the figures to be misleading. The former chief inspector dislikes the definition of mathematical literacy used by the OECD and considers the research methods used to be “suspect”.
But the Germans, whose test performance had been sliding gently downwards for several years, had been waiting for the PISA results because they represent the state of the art in international testing. The fact that last December’s results were even worse than previous comparisons meant that they are taking them very seriously.
All this leaves unanswered the mystery of why, as a nation, we are so unwilling to admit that our education system has improved enormously and will probably continue to do so for some time.
Could it be that so many top journalists and politicians have put their children into private education and have a vested interest in believing the state system is not up to scratch? Otherwise - perish the thought - they might have wasted a lot of money. A financier I met the other day was surprised to hear of our good results and assured me he would readily believe them - after he had had an independent statistician check the figures.
Is he equally suspicious about the OECD’s international trade figures and unemployment trends?
Perhaps the answer is something to do with the strange time-lag which accompanies public reputations - a phenomenon with which schools are all-too familiar. The Germans seem to date the slide in their standards from the early 1990s, yet we Brits were unaware of it.
Similarly, since everyone believes our system is below par, it looks like it is going to take another decade to turn our public reputation around. Just in time for the next slide - around 2010?
