3) Confused of London Bridge

There was much press coverage of a government sponsored report that found the reading performance of children in England had fallen in an international comparator study from third to 19th in the world http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/28_11_07_pirls_report.pdf Here's a link to a BBC summary, if you don't fancy reading a very long report http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7117230.stm . I found this confusing, as I had only just finished reading another study, which argued that standards of reading had remained the same for 50 years http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7075015.stm Yet another international study, the OECD PISA study, also found a decline in the UK’s educational position, where fifteen-year-olds were found to have fallen from 8th to 24th place in math’s attainment over the past six years, in reading their ranking has dropped from 7th to 17th and in science from 4th to 14th., http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/04/nedu404.xml , the full report can be found at http://www.pisa.oecd.org/document/2/0,3343,en_32252351_32236191_39718850_1_1_1_1,00.html
I’ve tried to follow government explanation for this slippage but frankly I am not clear. I think the main claim is that the UK system is improving but other countries are improving more rapidly. Also, there have also been suggestions of statistical unreliability as slightly different systems of data collection have been used between countries, while some statisticians have warned that a single year’s statistics are intrinsically unreliable, you need a series, and should base any analysis on multiple years of evidence.

This short season of educational standards reporting was further complicated by the American consultants McKinsey, who published the results of an extensive investigation into the world’s best performing school systems http://www.mckinsey.com/locations/ukireland/publications/pdf/Education_report.pdf They found that the quality of teaching staff was consistently the most important factor in educational achievement.