Educational Attainment: International Rankings

Debate between Lord Sharkey and Lord Nash

Tuesday 13th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharkey]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the United Kingdom’s performance in the latest Programme for International Student Assessment rankings published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Lord Nash) (Con)]

My Lords, the UK’s 15 year-olds performed above the OECD average in science and reading, and at the average in maths. This is a credit to the hard work of teachers and pupils. Obviously, however, we will struggle to maintain our position as the fifth-largest economy in the world if we do not raise our game; hence our extensive reforms. The pupils assessed in this PISA study did not experience most of the changes that we have made to secondary education and experienced virtually none of our reforms to primary education.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Sharkey (LD)]

It is, though, particularly disappointing to see us ranked 27th for mathematics, down one place again, and to see that 22% of our 15 year-olds cannot solve problems routinely faced by adults in their daily lives. The PISA study shows a strong correlation between the high usage of textbooks in teaching and high scores; textbook usage in England stands at 10%. What plans does the Minister have to significantly increase that measure, as I believe the Schools Minister would like to?

[Lord Nash]

I agree entirely with the noble Lord’s point on the importance of textbooks and rigorous teaching materials. Increasingly, we are seeing multi-academy trusts developing these for their teachers to ease their workload and to support them. We have introduced a rigorous maths curriculum at GCSE. We have launched 35 maths hubs as centres of excellence based on best practice internationally. They will work with schools to introduce high-quality textbooks as part of the department’s £41 million primary programme, Mathematics Mastery, announced in July.