You’d be forgiven for thinking that the media attention given to the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) test results every three years is a lot of fuss about nothing. I can’t tell you (and probably don’t need to) how frustrating it has been to hear various politicians waxing lyrical about “Singapore this” and “Finland that” over the past few years, when some of the policies they are justifying bear little relation to what is happening internationally and what research suggests is effective.

When I decided to go and work in schools in some of these “education superpowers” to see what all the excitement was about, it was with a healthy dose of scepticism. Although I probably wouldn’t have had it in me to write a book saying that Pisa was a load of tosh and that these countries were not worth learning from (having personally relied on the hospitality of their teachers who put me up in their own homes), I was quite prepared to come to such a conclusion privately.

I realised we do have a lot to learn from other education systems

But that didn’t happen. I did see things that made me feel uncomfortable, things that made me feel sad and things that made me feel angry: teachers in Finland continuing to teach while ignoring the children clearly chatting at the back; primary school children in Singapore still sitting in a tutorial centre until 9pm; migrant children in Shanghai being denied access to high school because they had the wrong paperwork. And in every country, I saw at least one lesson in which the teacher had completely lost control of the class (which reassured me that I had successfully avoided being steered into the “best” schools with the “best” classes).

However, these were not the strongest impressions I left with after my travels. Much of what I saw was based on genuine good sense, and this overshadowed the more negative elements. Often what I saw left me inspired. This doesn’t just mean that they did things I approved of; having sat through years of undergraduate psychology lectures, I am aware that what sounds like “common sense” is often not sensible at all. What I mean is, on the whole, education policies were thought through, teachers made use of practices that were supported by cognitive psychology, and students were consequently able to score highly in tests of problem-solving in reading, maths and/or science.

Masters of knowledge

Let me introduce you to Sophie, for example. Sophie’s real name is Muyuan, but all the Chinese students and teachers whom I met liked to introduce themselves by their “Western” name (I met three “Angels”). Sophie was educated in China until the age of 15, at which point she moved to Canada with her family and attended high school there.

We met up for a smoothie in downtown Toronto and I asked her what the key differences were between her experiences of schooling in the two places. “The most significant difference I find is the depth of material covered. In Canada they do a little bit of everything, and they do it really fast, before you really get the essence of that part, and then they jump into something else. Whereas in China they go on about some knowledge for quite a long time, maybe several weeks before they move to the next topic, so you get a lot of practice, and you really know it.”

Some of you will recognise this Chinese approach as mastery learning, which is described by the Education Endowment Foundation in its research review as “a promising strategy for narrowing the gap”. It has even been found to work in England - research showed that children in mastery-based maths classes made an additional one month’s progress over the course of a year.

Sophie’s description corresponded with what I’d seen in China and Singapore, where teachers also met weekly to plan the most effective ways to get their students to master each topic, sharing knowledge among staff with different levels of experience.

Expertise everywhere

But, in saying that, I don’t wish to do down the Canadian education system - we have things to learn from it, too. Though the teaching of maths is not comparable with what happens in East Asian economies, Canada scores more highly than the UK across all three Pisa subjects, and its approach to supporting underachievers helps to explain why it also has some of the most equitable results out of all the “top performers”.

The educators I met in British Columbia and Ontario emphasised positive relationships and student engagement in helping students to achieve, with one primary school principal describing her role as “making sure there’s an entry point for each child”.

Across the schools I spent time in, there was value put on extra-curricular activities for their effect on student belonging, there were school counsellors, there were buddy systems and there were peer tutors. Crucially, and in common with Finland, they also employed additional qualified teachers to support the weakest students in and out of class, recognising that teaching the “hardest to teach” requires additional expertise.

Working in these schools, and living with these teachers, I realised that we do have a lot to learn from these other education systems. Research trials on specific policies can only take us so far; to understand how educational approaches work together in a context to effect educational change, you need to learn from examples of where this has happened.

If you look at the “education superpowers”, it is (mainly) not because of luck, accident or cheating that, on average, students in these places come top of the world in these problem-solving tests of maths, reading and science. If you think these tests aren’t important, then ignore them. But if you want more children to leave school literate and numerate, don’t be too quick to dismiss what these “superpowers” are doing.

Lucy Crehan is an international education consultant at the Education Development Trust, and author of Cleverlands: the secrets behind the success of the world’s most celebrated education systems, which will be published on 1 December by Unbound