One of Michael Gove’s favourite arguments for his school reforms is that Britain has plummeted down the international education league tables. In June 2011 he told Policy Exchange that the UK had fallen from “4th to 16th place in science; from 7th to 25th place in literacy; and from 8th to 28th in maths” between 2000 and 2009 in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
But how reliable are the statistics? In this week’s NS, Peter Wilby draws attention to a story that deserves more than attention than it has so far received (no national paper has reported on it). Last month, in response to a letter from David Miliband, Andrew Dilnot, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, expressed “concern” about the Department for Education’s unqualified use of the figures. He noted that the OECD’s 2009 report for the UK included the following “important caveat”:
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