When Michael Gove became education secretary in 2010, the UK’s scores in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), which compares education attainment across 38 developed countries, were “at an all-time low”, said The Times. Gove used the data to “argue for urgent reforms” and introduced a new curriculum in England that emphasised core subjects.Since then, the UK’s 15-year-olds have “climbed global rankings” in literacy and numeracy; they are now ninth among OECD peers for reading (up from 20th) and 11th for maths (up from 22nd). In the most recent Pisa assessment, the UK’s scores were all “above the OECD average”.
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