This week, the Government had a rare bit of good news: despite some fall in the actual outcomes, which can be at least in part explained by Covid, schools in England are climbing the rankings in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the standardised educational attainment measure run by the OECD.
In fact, it can go so far as to claim that England is now “one of the top performing countries in the western world”, ranking alongside such nations as Finland if still lagging behind the East Asian countries which traditionally dominate the leaderboard.
Scotland’s results, by contrast, have been dire. From the BBC:
“Scotland’s score in the 2022 Pisa assessment for reading was 493, down from 504 in 2018 and 526 in 2000 when the Pisa study started.”
“For maths the score in 2022 was 471, which is just below the OECD average of 472 points. However, Scotland’s score is down from 489 in 2018 and 491 in 2015.”
“In science, Scotland’s score was 483 points, below the 490 result in 2018 and 497 in 2015.”
Some of this will be the impact of the pandemic, of course. But the long-term trend is clear, as the Scotsman reports:
“Scotland’s scores in 2022 were 471 for maths, 483 for science and 493 in reading. In the first Pisa results from 2000, they were 524 for maths, 515 for science and 526 for reading, although caution is advised with comparisons to the initial years of the study.”
All this means that Scotland, once the best-performing of the home nations when it came to education, is now third-placed in both maths and science, although it continues to outperform Northern Ireland in reading. Or, as Alex Massie explains in the Times: “Fifteen-year-olds are producing the kinds of scores that would have been expected from 13-year-olds a generation ago.”
The only comforting constant for Scottish ministers is that they continue to outperform Wales. But Wales’ woeful education record is no bar to be proud of clearing. When I first started writing this column in 2013, one piece I returned to time and again was this article from the Economist‘s Bagehot column on “the self-inflicted Welsh education debacle”:
“Welsh exam results fell so precipitously during the Labour era that academics from elsewhere flocked to the principality to investigate what had gone wrong. They discovered not a funding gap but a man-made crisis triggered by Welsh politicians, who bowed to bullying from teachers’ unions and scrapped examination league tables.”
This column is not the place to really dig into the policy differences which have produced these outcomes, despite consistently higher public funding per head in both Scotland and Wales.
But there is an interesting point here about the structure of devolution, which is that it was never guaranteed that this cold light would be cast on devolved education performance at all.
Both Massie in 2022 and Bagehot in 2012 have compared the situation with devolved schools to an “experiment”, with different home nations applying different policies in an environment where most other variables remain broadly the same. Such thinking is in line with some of the optimistic cases first made for devolution in the 1990s: that different parts of the UK could experiment, with best practice eventually being taken up elsewhere to the benefit of all.
It has not worked out this way. As we saw during the pandemic, devocrats time and again prioritised doing something differently to England over getting programmes such as volunteer coordination, or grocery deliveries for the vulnerable, running as fast as possible. As the decade between that Economist article and these latest figures shows, bad policies are not corrected.
Instead, devolved politicians have often done everything they can to thwart cross-border comparisons altogether. Ask the House of Commons Library for a briefing on comparative school performance across the United Kingdom, as I once did, and what you get is mostly a caveat that data in the different home nations is not collected on a comparable basis.
And when Michael Gove had the temerity to highlight the difference in English and Welsh school performance in a 2014 article for the Western Mail, he was accused by Huw Lewis, then the Welsh Government’s education minister, of harbouring “invincible colonial attitudes” which were “the dark heart of the Conservative Party in England”. (Suffice to say, Gove has been vindicated.)
Scotland, meanwhile, was in 2014 branded “data poor” by education experts over the lack of formalised testing; just last year it emerged that only half of pupils actually completed standardised tests.
For a while Scotland even opted out of parts of PISA, and whilst Jenny Gilruth, the current education secretary, deserves credit for opting back in, a 2021 report raised several serious concerns about Scotland’s 2018 figures, including an abnormally high number of ineligible pupils which potentially excluded a disproportionate number of “lower academic achievers”.
It shouldn’t be like this – and it need not be like this. A simple policy change would fix it: mandating the Office for National Statistics to collect and publish data on public service performance, most obviously education and health, on a uniform basis across the entire United Kingdom.
Such a policy ought to unite unionists of any stripe. For true believers in devolution, it represents a way to apply sunlight to policies in dire need of disinfectant, and revive the original promise of a decentralised UK which encouraged innovation and shared best practice. For devosceptics, it would offer a regular and rigorous assessment of the actual impact of devolution on essential services.
Labour would likely be reluctant to do this; it would embarrass both the Welsh Government, which has been Labour-led since its inception in 1998, and éminences grises such as Gordon Brown, who are responsible for devolution and thus committed to doubling down on it at any cost.
But it would be a hard thing to actually object to were the Government to bring it forward – who doesn’t like more evidence? Were Rishi Sunak to do so, he might yet make a lasting contribution to the better health of the Union.