The UK has suffered a sharp decline in its performance in the latest round of influential international academic tests, wiping out recent progress, as the widespread disruption caused by Covid continued to take its toll on education.
The OECD’s programme for international student assessment (Pisa), which compares educational attainment among 15-year-olds around the world, showed UK schoolchildren achieved their lowest scores in mathematics and science since 2006 – the first year of comparable data.
Reading results were also down, close to the previous minimum in 2009, but other participating countries had even greater declines in attainment, which meant the UK slightly improved its ranking in the global league tables for maths and reading, despite its reduced scores.
About 690,000 pupils from 81 countries and economies took part in the 2022 Pisa assessment, the results of which were published on Tuesday after a year-long delay owing to the global pandemic, which inevitably shaped the latest set of results.
UK maths results slumped by 13 points and reading by 10 compared with the last Pisa round in 2018, while attainment in science, which has been in long-term decline, went down a further five points. The average OECD maths performance, by comparison, dropped by almost 16 points over the same period. Previously such changes have never exceeded four points.
There were marked differences between the four UK nations, with England coming out on top, having achieved a mean Pisa maths score of 492 compared with the OECD average of 472, taking England from 17th in the Pisa rankings for maths in 2018 to 11th in 2022. England also climbed from 14th to 13th position for reading, and remained in 13th for science, according to the Department for Education.
