The Timss results last week provided a shock, resembling that of the first Pisa round in 2000.

Finland tumbled in the Timss rank order, while Kazakhstan climbed significantly in maths and Russia improved its relative performance in science.

My research group has always suggested that we look beyond league-table rankings such as these - and those published by Pisa earlier this week - to see what’s happening to the overall scores that are behind the tables. Timss reveals a substantial drop in scores for Finland, alongside a substantial rise in those from Kazakhstan.

These changes need to be taken seriously. The press comments suggested that the results came as something of a surprise. Russia? Kazakhstan? Improving? Finland deteriorating? But for those who have talked to educators in these countries and watched the subtle signs around the margins, they were not a great shock.

The insights from these suggest that we need to be very careful when we listen to those cultural revolutionaries who say “forget the past, think of the future, focus on future skills and future knowledge”.

Struggling with change

Of course, we need to think about what education will need to supply to prepare future generations for fruitful personal, social and economic life. But some of the essentials that they need may come from things that have proved to be of educational benefit in the past. The wheel is still round. Water continues to boil at 100°C at sea level. The masculine and feminine is still important in speaking French. It is not reactionary to look at the past - it is important educational archaeology, relevant to present-day success and effective, evidence-based policy.

When Gabriel Heller Sahlgren and I started to dig a bit more deeply into the history of educational reform in Finland, we began to see clearly the way in which earlier decisions played out years later in education systems. Our analysis showed that the origins of Finnish educational success lay in a whole series of features and actions from the 1970s and before. While the 1980s saw a genuine and impressive improvement in performance, Finland’s education system shifted its form and emphasis in the late 1990s; its performance then topped out in 2000, at the head of the Pisa tables in some areas.

Since then, it has struggled with changes in the learning attitudes of young people, structural changes in the school system and population shifts. While its current policies pin great hope on radical cross-curriculum approaches, there is nothing that guarantees that these will arrest the decline in its scores. In fact, much of the recent evidence on such approaches suggests that they will widen rather than close performance differences explained by social background, and reduce acquisition of core science and maths, which is what is assessed in Timss.

To those following the history, the Finnish results are no surprise.

Focused Kazakh reform

Meanwhile, Kazakhstan’s results are fascinating. The country has embarked on concerted reform, focusing tightly on improvement in educational outcomes. My colleagues in Cambridge have been inside its schools, supporting the development of curriculum and assessment.

Many educationalists offering advice to the country have argued for “future skills” and “21st-century thinking’. But I caused a minor sensation at a seminar in the capital Astana, in a discussion with the country’s subject experts. Few researchers outside Kazakhstan had carefully watched the performance of its students in international maths Olympiads or examined the country’s approach to maths teaching, which had been built carefully over decades.

At the seminar, I referred to the importance of understanding the key features of the approach to maths in the Soviet Union, which led to very high levels of qualification in maths teachers and a deep commitment to maths didactics. The room broke out into excited exchanges of Kazakh and Russian. When it died down, a leading Kazakh educator requested that I “continue with this line of argument - no foreign analyst has raised the assets of what we do presently and which come from our history”.

No ‘I told you so’

This was, of course, the same insight that Gabriel and I had found when we looked at Finland: never ignore the historical background that can explain educational success. So, for me, the Kazakh Timss results are not a surprise either.

But this is not intended to be smug in any way - a “told you so”. Far from it, Timss and Pisa are invaluable as stimulants to enquiry: why this improvement here? Why that deterioration there?

These studies suggest places to look, lines of enquiry to follow. For some countries, elements of their past are catching up with them in an entirely beneficial way. For others, leaving behind key practices may be the source of some serious difficulties.

We always should have an eye on the past, as well as the future. Only then can we begin to build sound, evidence-based future policy.

Tim Oates CBE is group director of assessment research and development at Cambridge Assessment. He led the coalition government’s review of the national curriculum in England