Authored by Toby Young via The Daily Sceptic,
When I think of Michael Gove perusing the latest PISA league tables, proving yet again that his education reforms have transformed the life chances of English schoolchildren, a line from Broadcast News, the 1987 romcom, comes to mind.
"It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you're the smartest person in the room," says a veteran television news man to a young female producer.
"No," she replies. "It's awful."
When it comes to teaching and learning, the man who ran the Department for Education from 2010 - 14 really does know better. As he has pointed out, a natural experiment has taken place in Great Britain over the last 16 years - longer, if you date the beginning of the reform programme to the Labour and Skills Act 2000 - with England implementing a raft of educational reforms and Scotland and Wales stubbornly sticking to the same old failed formula. The results in the just-published 2025 PISA data are there for all to see.
English 15 year-olds scored 492 in maths, 497 in reading and 516 in science - 29, 36 and 34 points respectively above the OECD average. England now sits comfortably in the upper reaches of the developed world, having climbed into the top 10 in all three subjects.
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