Professor John Robertson OBA, for nearly 40 years a schoolteacher, a teacher education lecturer, Associate Dean for Quality Assurance, research methods lecturer, PhD supervisor and Faculty Research Ethics Chair
The Holyrood podcast Politically Speaking is owned by the Tory, Lord Ashcroft. He owns the Holyrood magazine too. They currently have Prof (rtd) Lindsay Paterson on to tell you plainly that Scotland’s falling Pisa scores are the consequence of devolution and SNP policies and that England is doing better.
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I’ll repeat our, utterly mainstream in academia (proper that is) and long-standing demolition of Pisa but first the obligatory reminder of just who Prof Paterson is and is not.
Why is Paterson not an expert at all? This:
Professor of Educational Policy at Edinburgh University, Lindsay Paterson is a statistician with a background in agricultural and medical research using statistical methods. He has absolutely no experience of teaching in schools or in teacher education methods. He has no experience of school management or of research into the curriculum other than in counting assessment data. He’s just a jumped up bean-counter. Despite that, he’ll turn up on request, rent-a-gob, to say something bad about any Scottish Government decision that involves numbers.
So, to the Pisa scores he relies upon:
Here’s what a hugely experienced, retired, Glasgow head teacher, has to say about Pisa scores:
By Alasdair Macdonald
The issue is with PISA. It has very little statistical rigour and offers nothing in the way of improving educational practice.
I was a secondary school head teacher at the time it and other ‘measures’ were introduced in education in Scotland in other places. I and my colleagues argued against it.
Educational provision, like everything else, ought to be continuously evaluated, partly to get evidence on whether it is achieving the aims set out for it and partly to get information on areas which require attention. However, there are, literally, hundreds of aspects to be measured and many of these aspects are not measurable by things like tests of arithmetical competence. Such tests are part of the picture but their results are not the full picture (insofar as a full picture can be obtained) Most of the data have to be set in a fairly long time context so that temporary fluctuations can be seen. Usually such temporary fluctuations are easily explainable, in the cases of individual schools.
Such data do, in fact exist. There is a great deal of it and it requires a great deal of care and experience to identify things which are of statistical significance. And things can be significantly ‘good’ as well as ‘poor’.
PISA is of no benefit in this evaluative context. It is an instrument of BLAME and, as such, is a tool of control and compliance over schools and teachers. For some politicians and their media mouthpieces it is a malign instrument which stifles the creativity which is an essential part of teaching.
Some of those in power see such creativity as presenting a threat to their power.
Creativity and the autonomy necessary to be creative can challenge power, but it is the way that people in all walks of life improve things. It is essential in medicine, science, engineering, the arts, social policy, etc.
PISA is a club to beat creativity out of teachers and schools.
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Footnote:
Further reading: ‘Does PISA measure anything of importance? Not really, but you wouldn’t know it from the weight policy makers and media ascribe to the results.’
Interpreting PISA Results: It’s Poverty, Stupid (With a Bit of the iPhone)
As for Scotland performing ‘below’ England? Complete twaddle. See:
Here’s a short video version: https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2026/03/10/short-video-on-englands-pisa-scores-are-based-only-on-a-tiny-selective-sample-of-higher-achieving-schools-making-paul-okanes-sad-desperate-attempt-to-claim-they-are-better/
‘Pisa tests fail to recognise what’s important in education and should be ignored’ https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/pisa-tests-fail-recognise-whats-important-education-and-should-be-ignored
OECD and Pisa tests are damaging education worldwide – academics https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/may/06/oecd-pisa-tests-damaging-education-academics
Too few students from England took part in the study – meaning the results could be up to eight points too generous, as more higher-performing pupils took part. https://schoolsweek.co.uk/pisa-2022-rise-in-maths-but-warning-over-inflated-results/#:~:text=But%20the%20country’s%20performance%20is,caution%20on%20interpreting%20the%20findings.
I could go on with quotes about Pisa but the above three give a flavour of just how useless they are. Only politicians use them and do so to make cynical and unsubstantiated points.
You only have to look a bit deeper to find more credible measures of attainment in Scottish schools and there is good news there.
First on SQA Higher and Advanced Higher:
The Higher gap has narrowed by almost 1% to 16% from 16.9% in 2019 and crucially participation by the most disadvantaged has climbed.
At SCQF level 7 (Advanced Higher), the gap in 2009/10, two years after the SNP first came to power, was 24.1 and by 2021/22 it was 22.2, though down from 25 in the previous year but more important the most disadvantaged group at this level was increasing in size dramatically.
In 2009/10 only 4.7% of those in the most disadvantaged 20% had achieved at this level but by 2021/22, the figure was 10.3%, more than doubling in only 12 years. Remember also, that 20% means nearly 3 000 pupils every year. https://www.tes.com/magazine/news/secondary/sqa-results-2023
Second, in Primary Schools:
The poverty-related attainment gaps in literacy and numeracy levels across primary schools have seen the biggest decreases since records began, official statistics show.
The gap between the proportion of primary pupils from the most and least-deprived areas achieving expected levels has narrowed by 3.4 percentage points in literacy and 3.7 percentage points in numeracy, according to the Achievement of Curriculum for Excellence Levels (ACEL) 2021/22. This marks the largest narrowing of the gap in a year since consistent records began in 2016/17.https://www.gov.scot/news/record-narrowing-of-the-attainment-gap/
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Third, why increases in attainment matter more than any gap:
Critics can be found in much of the media shouting about our supposed failure to sufficiently narrow the gap between the most and the least deprived.
At SCQF level 7, the gap in 2009/10, two years after the SNP first came to power, was 24.1 and by 2021/22 it was still 22.2, though down from 25 in the previous year. If you have limited understating of statistics or cynically only wish to accuse the SNP Government of failure, these statistics hide the true nature of change.
In 2009/10 only 4.7% of those in the most disadvantaged 20% had achieved at this level but by 2021/22, the figure was 10.3%, more than doubling in only 12 years. Remember also, that 20% means nearly 3 000 pupils every year.
Over the same period 28.8% of those in the most advantaged 20% had achieved at this level and by 2021/22, the figure was 38.8%, a smaller in percentage but larger in actual numbers, increase.[v]
So, despite the major improvement among those from the most deprived 20%, there had also been a significant improvement among the least deprived 20%. So, the gap had only narrowed slightly, after widening in the previous year, and two successes, one in a priority area for government, the gap widened in 2020/21 and then only narrowed in 2021/22, is then reported as failure.
We could, of course easily narrow the gap by simply denying access to Level 7 for many of those in the least disadvantaged 20%. That’s exactly the kind of social engineering they did in Albania for much of the second half of the 20th Century and in Communist China during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s.
The attainment gap is a largely artificial and mostly political idea with no meaning for those it describes. What really matters is the massive improvement in the life chances of those in the most disadvantaged 20%. It’s not enough, of course, but this fact relates to the real experience of thousands rather than that of the media and opposition party opportunism.
There have been similar improvements in attainment for the other three groups between the most and the least disadvantaged. The gaps between them and the least disadvantaged are narrower and, of course, of no interest to the media.
Away from formal examination-based assessment, there has been considerable progress on narrowing attainment gaps, in primary schools, at a stage when there is not the pressure to compete for access to high status universities. In December 2022, we could read in Scottish Government announcements, if not in the media:
“The poverty-related attainment gaps in literacy and numeracy levels across primary schools have seen the biggest decreases since records began, official statistics show. The gap between the proportion of primary pupils from the most and least-deprived areas achieving expected levels has narrowed by 3.4 percentage points in literacy and 3.7 percentage points in numeracy, according to the Achievement of Curriculum for Excellence Levels (ACEL) 2021/22. This marks the largest narrowing of the gap in a year since consistent records began in 2016/17. There has also been a record increase in the proportion of primary school pupils achieving the expected levels of literacy (up 3.7 percentage points to 70.5%) and numeracy (up 3.3 percentage points to 77.9%).”[vi]
Taken together and based on evidence, we see a very different picture of the achievements of the SNP in Government, in this last decade and more, in assisting schools and learners to achieve all that they can achieve.
In the end, of course, most of the credit goes to the learners and to the schools but just as the opposition parties would want to claim credit had they been in government and, had the trends that matter gone the other way, they would blame us for it, the SNP in government deserves its share.
[i] https://www.gov.scot/publications/summary-statistics-attainment-initial-leaver-destinations-no-5-2023-edition/documents/
[ii] http://zhaolearning.com/2014/03/09/how-does-pisa-put-the-world-at-risk-part-1-romanticizing-misery/
[iii] https://progressgp.wordpress.com/2014/08/03/does-south-koreas-education-system-hurt-its-students/
[iv] https://thediplomat.com/2017/03/hong-kongs-wave-of-student-suicides/
[v] https://www.gov.scot/publications/summary-statistics-attainment-initial-leaver-destinations-no-5-2023-edition/documents/
[vi] https://www.gov.scot/news/record-narrowing-of-the-attainment-gap/
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