There has been a “significant” drop in the emphasis on science teaching in England over time, Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman said as she reacted to the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) results.
Speaking at a panel event on the release of the Pisa 2022 results this morning, Ms Spielman highlighted the decline in science scores and said there has been “a real contrast” in the underlying trends in the subject compared to reading and maths in recent years.
Fifteen-year-olds in the UK who took the Pisa test in 2022 scored an average of 500 points (503 in England). Although this is higher than the UK’s maths and reading scores (489 and 494 respectively), science has been consistently declining.
The UK got 515 on Pisa 2006 in science - and the score has been lower every year since then, following a mostly similar trend in England alone from 516 in 2006.
Ms Spielman pointed to the impact of decisions to scrap science tests in key stage 2 and 3 Sats.
The chief inspector said: “There are three significant policy decisions that have probably contributed to this. The children taking Pisa in this round had a significantly different experience than the children taking Pisa 10 or 15 years ago.
“They had been through education in a world where there weren’t KS3 tests, where there weren’t KS2 science tests and where all subject level inspection had been removed from inspection, which is the other big lever.
“So the intersection of those policies, I think, created a significant de-emphasis of science relative to reading and maths, and possibly also other parts of the system.”
Science tests in KS2 Sats were dropped in 2009. Research by the Wellcome Trust in 2011 found that science teaching in primary schools declined after the tests were cut.
All national KS3 Sats were dropped in 2008 by then Labour education secretary Ed Balls.
Pisa results
Ms Spielman also highlighted today how the latest Pisa report suggests that countries who were both “high performing” and “high equity” had policies targeted at low performance rather than policies directly targeted at students low on the socioeconomic scale.
She added: “It’s somewhat counterintuitive to many people to think the best way to create equity isn’t necessarily to simply channel resources directly at the subset of most disadvantaged students and that we may actually do better for them by approaching things in a slightly different way.
“Some of those discussions cropped up directly in the context of the tutoring programme and whether it should be targeted primarily at students from low-income families and other kinds of disadvantage, or whether it should be targeted primarily at students who, for whatever reason, had fallen out of the range of the current classroom to get them back into the range of classroom teaching.
“I argued for the latter. But I understand the emotional pull of focusing on disadvantage, so I think we need to unpack that more.”
Disadvantage gap
In England, there was a gap of 252 points on Pisa 2022 for maths between the highest and lowest performing students - which is significantly larger than the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development average of 235 points (and up from 240 in England in 2018).
New schools minister Damian Hinds was also present at the Policy Exchange presentation of the Pisa 2022 results. He spoke about the disadvantage gap widening since the pandemic.
“While we cannot sadly make sure that every child has exactly the same opportunities at home, we must make sure they have that opportunity at school,” Mr Hinds said.
He added that his job as an education minister was to continue progress towards making education more equal by the next set of Pisa results.
