PISA figures have a clear message for Scottish education: copy England – Professor Lindsay Paterson
Scotland needs to realise that while enjoyment in education is desirable, some learning is unavoidably tedious, writes Professor Lindsay Paterson
The results of the latest international PISA tests have only a few encouraging details for Scottish education.
There is one bit of quite good news: science has bounced back (a little) from the harm caused by closing schools during Covid. That is what we might expect. Students can’t really do science at home.
On two other domains assessed by PISA – reading and mathematics – most parents can provide real advice. The most able students by the age of 15, when the PISA tests happen, can read for themselves. To some extent, that is true also of mathematics. But science always needs laboratories and expensive equipment, and trying to think about science without the immediately accessible expertise of science teachers is impossible.
Mobile phone ban and reading for pleasure
So that’s good, but it’s very limited. Science recovered only to where it was before Covid, in 2018. Mathematics and reading did not. The decline in reading is a global phenomenon, which the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – the managers of PISA – attribute to social media and the weakening capacity of young people to concentrate on lengthy, difficult texts.
This can be fixed, but requires strong policy – ban mobile phones in schools, don’t let students away with avoiding lengthy, challenging texts, and encourage reading for pleasure outside school. JK Rowling, Queen Camilla and the late Dolly Parton showed how this can be done.
Scotland also has a problem with discouraging high attainers and depressing the aspirations of middle-class children. The top 10 per cent of attainers in each of the three domains have stagnated. The attainment of children of well-off, well-educated parents has actually fallen in all three domains. That gloomy fact has allowed the Scottish government to boast that social inequality in Scotland is low by international standards. But it’s easy to reduce inequality by bashing the rich. That doesn’t help anyone.
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England’s success
What to do about all this? One answer is also contained in these PISA statistics: England. The stand-out achievement globally has been England’s relative success. Science improved there too and, more strikingly, mathematics and reading did not decline. When reading elsewhere is declining so drastically, any country that can resist the trend is worth emulating.
The key difference between English and Scottish policy in the past quarter of a century has been on the curriculum. Under governments of various political hues, England has come to stress the importance of knowledge that is structured into subjects – mathematics, English, the sciences, the social subjects, etc.
High-quality research has shown that all sound learning requires knowledge of this kind. It is true that England’s school curriculum does have some problems. Until a couple of years ago, it didn’t give nearly enough space to music or art or dance. That is now changing.
Scotland has neglected all this, in the interests of promoting skills and enjoyment. But skills depend totally on knowledge, whether they are the skills of a surgeon or the skills of an electrician. Enjoyment is desirable in learning, but is not enough.
Some learning is unavoidably tedious – think of learning multiplication tables, or French irregular verbs. But without that secure basis, later fulfilment and enjoyable satisfaction are impossible.
So if there is one lesson for Scotland it is this: copy England.
Lindsay Paterson is professor of education policy at Edinburgh University
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