Every three years, an early Christmas gift arrives for the global education community from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The Programme for International Student Assessments (Pisa) is an international test in which 15 year olds are tested on their knowledge and skills.
It relegates those far below the Pisa top ten as poor performers in desperate need of improvement, which this time includes Wales.
The Pisa scores for participating education systems around the world are unquestionably significant. But since its inception in 2000, Pisa has sparked much debate, especially among experts and policymakers, with many viewing it as a flawed assessment of educational outcomes. In 2018, around 600,000 students took part in the standardised Pisa tests, which measured their performance in maths, science and reading, and also looked at wellbeing.
Predictably, the 2023 Pisa results captured the negative impact of COVID on learners and learning, with some downward trends in performance visible across the data set.
