Best Practice

PISA: Beyond the league tables and the headlines

Pupil wellbeing Literacy and numeracy
The main findings and rankings of the international PISA research make newspaper headlines every three years, but there is so much more to learn if we take the time to look at the results in more depth. Steen Videbaek offers us his analysis

Last month saw the release of the 2018 results from the Programme for International Student Assessment. PISA is a large-scale international assessment involving 600,000 pupils from 79 jurisdictions from the OECD (and beyond), including 13,668 pupils from 459 school across the UK (OECD, 2019).

Understandably, the initial PISA media attention focused on the headline numbers – whether they went up or down, where they ranked and how they compared to the OECD average.

But beyond these headlines lies a rich information source waiting to be explored.

Take reading, the major focus of the 2018 cycle. A cursory look at the average scores sees that England, Scotland and Northern Ireland all scored significantly higher than the OECD average, with Wales performing similarly to OECD average.

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