News
Study signals UK’s school system 'failing to keep pace' with other nations
6 Dec 2010
Michael Gove told MPs recently that the UK's school system was 'failing to keep pace' with other nations after results from the most respected international study of achievement in literacy are likely to show that schools in Britain are performing poorly compared with other countries.
The coalition government will point to OECD figures, due to be published today, that compare British pupils with teenagers in other developed nations as evidence of a decline in standards under the previous government.
Michael Gove says:
"In the last three years of the last government reform went into reverse – schools lost freedoms, the curriculum lost rigour, Labour lost its way. Now, under this coalition government, we are once more travelling in the same direction as the most ambitious and most progressive nations."
The results are based on tests of 15-year-olds carried out in 2009, and follow a set of results for Britain in 2007, when the country was downgraded in literacy, as well as maths and science.
The Education Secretary has indicated his ambition for schools in England to be more like Finland's; name-checking the country nine times in his recent education white paper.
The survey, which included 65 countries, revealed that Britain had dropped from seventh to 17th place in reading. Pupils in New Zealand, Ireland, Australia and Estonia were among those who did better than British children at reading.
In the foreword to the schools white paper, David Cameron and Nick Clegg quoted the figures as evidence that England was being overtaken by international competitors.
The foreword stated:
"The only way we can catch up, and have the world-class schools our children deserve, is by learning the lessons of other countries' success. The first and most important lesson is that no education system can be better than the quality of its teachers. The most successful countries ... are those where teaching has the highest status as a profession; South Korea recruits from their top 5% of graduates and Finland from the top 10%."
The Finnish system has inspired Gove to look at bringing in aptitude and personality tests to help select candidates for teacher training.
Read more on The Guardian website.
Read more on the BBC website.
