ASCL welcomes health warning on PISA comparisons

ASCL welcomes the report from the University of London published today, which shows that much more care needs to be taken in interpreting international comparison data from the PISA and TIMSS studies.

Brian Lightman said:

“Benchmarking the UK education system against international standards is a valuable exercise and PISA and TIMSS are a useful tools for doing this. However, they come with a large health warning. As this report clearly shows statistics must be used carefully and in context. ASCL strongly supports evidence-based policy but that does not mean cherry picking international statistics to justify a particular policy direction, as this government has tended to do in the past.”

“Misleading comparisons and alarmist sound bites about us plummeting down league tables do the British teaching profession a great disservice and undermine public confidence in our good and improving education service.  At a time when high quality education is a priority for our economy and the wellbeing of our society, we cannot afford to be distracted by misinterpretations of the data.”

“I hope that this report will be taken seriously at all levels and used as the basis for encouraging a constructively self-critical, self-evaluative culture within the profession, which is the lynchpin of high expectations.”

To download the report from the Institute of Education, England's “plummeting" PISA test scores between 2000 and 2009: Is the performance of our secondary school pupils really in relative decline? go to www.ioe.ac.uk/Study_Departments/ 

7 December 2011