Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the reasons for the UK's static position over the last three years, and in particular its decline in the maths ratings, with reference to the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment results for 2015.

The Government is committed to raising standards in mathematics to reflect the best practice in the world. In the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015, 15 year olds in the UK perform at the OECD average in mathematics. Although the UK dropped one place in the PISA rankings for mathematics since 2012 – from 26^th to 27^th – five more countries took part in the study and the UK’s score of 494 remained the same from 2012 to 2015.

We continue to reform our primary and secondary curriculum and standards. The first cohort is due to take the new GCSEs in mathematics next summer. The pupils who sat the 2015 PISA assessment in England were born around the year 2000 and have experienced little of the changes introduced since 2010, and virtually none of the reforms in primary education.