Schools face up to global leagues

What do the England football team and English schools have in common? The answer is that both have just failed to make the grade in the latest international competitions.

And let's have no sniggering from north of the border: Scotland also failed to qualify for the elite league in either football or reading scores, although its fall in the latter rankings was less dramatic than England's.

But does it matter? Should there be resignations or sackings? Well, in the case of football, the answer was clearly "yes". In education it is harder to tell.

This is not because football is more important than educational performance (perish the thought) but because the evidence is so much harder to interpret when looking at international comparisons in education.

So let's have a quick look at the headlines in the latest trends in international educational performance. And I will try to keep this as straightforward as such complex statistical comparisons allow.

This week's big competition was the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, or Pirls for short. It is the World Cup for reading standards amongst 10-11 year-olds and is held every five years.

Between the lines

In the last competition, England did exceptionally well taking the bronze medal position behind Sweden and the Netherlands.

This time, England slumped to 15th (rather confusingly Canada entered the competition as five separate provinces, four of which scored higher than England, which is why some accounts placed England even lower in 19th place).

There were more countries involved in the latest competition, which may explain some of the decline. But the harsh reality is that the reading scores for England actually fell between the two testing dates, 2001 and 2006.

By contrast Scotland, which fell from 14th to 26th place, recorded virtually no change in its absolute score.

So there is a case for holding a serious inquest into what has happened to reading in England over the past five years. This is particularly true since the government has set so much store by literacy in primary schools, with so much else taking second place to the focus on performance in the national English tests.

So the hard facts are these: England's reading score fell from 553 to 539. This was one of the biggest declines recorded by any of the countries in the study. Only Romania and Morocco had larger falls.

Significant decline

The fall was greater amongst girls (-14) than amongst boys (-11). There was also a larger fall in the reading for "literary purposes" tests compared to the drop in reading for "informational purposes".

Of the five English-speaking countries in both the 2001 and 2006 tests, England was the only one to show a significant decline in scores. Scotland, New Zealand and the USA all stayed about the same, while Singapore showed a big improvement.

So what has happened to reading in England? I won't insult your intelligence by offering any simple answers. We can leave that to football. For, again, the reality is that statistics are much more vulnerable to misunderstanding and misinterpretation than goals.

However, this is cause for concern, particularly as it coincides with another international ranking, this time for science performance at secondary school level, which also shows England slumping from 4th to 14th place.

This second study, the Programme for International Student Assessment, or Pisa, is due to report more fully next week, so for now I will focus just on the Pirls reading study.

Attitude to reading

The countries that have achieved the biggest improvements in reading are Russia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Slovenia. They also take the top four rankings overall.

It is very noticeable that all four countries have been going through large-scale education reforms during this period. However there are no easy answers to what makes a successful system, as there is no common pattern to these reforms, although Russia and Slovenia have both moved to an earlier start to school education.

As an aside on statistical method, it is also worth noting that the Russian students in the 2006 study were six months older than their counterparts in the previous study and fewer of them attended rural schools, which tend to score lower than urban schools. I add this just as a pinch of salt to the overall findings.

So, it seems that a system-wide drive on educational standards can make a real difference. But what else can we deduce from these results?

It may be significant that 10 year-olds in England have a relatively poor attitude towards reading. Moreover this attitude has deteriorated since 2001.

On the basis of answers to questionnaires, 15% of English pupils were in the category with the poorest attitude towards reading. This was higher than most other countries.

Unsurprisingly, children with a poor attitude to reading scored much lower in the reading tests than peers who enjoyed the activity.

Reading for pleasure

The report also found that children in England reported reading for pleasure less frequently than their peers in many other countries. There had also been a significant fall in the number of children readings novels or stories on a daily basis.

The other very interesting finding was that children in England were far less confident about their reading ability than in other countries. They were also less confident than their peers had been five years earlier.

Indeed English pupils were in 25th place when ranked on the proportion of pupils with the highest level of reading confidence.

Similarly, England had a higher proportion of pupils than any other country in the lowest category of reading confidence.

So, to sum up, English pupils have seen a fall in their reading scores at the same time as they are losing confidence in their reading, taking less pleasure in it, and turning to books less often at home.

It is tempting to link this to claims that English children are amongst the most highly tested in the world. They also face high stakes tests at a younger age than most and, according to various studies, are amongst the least happy in the world.

This could be the result of a school system that, by international standards, makes an early start to formal instruction and testing. And remember it has just been suggested that there should be readings tests at age six, a year earlier than now

Or it could be down to family influences, including the number of books in the home, the amount of home reading, and the availability of TV and electronic games.

But, whatever the cause, the lesson seems to be that we need to put the pleasure and self-confidence back into reading both in school and at home.

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