Sir Peter Lampl: Our focus has to be on training better teachers

Governments around the globe await the three-yearly PISA results with bated breath. They tell us how well our young people are doing compared to those in over 70 other countries.

Today’s results are a mixed bag. On the plus side, though we significant gaps remain, disadvantaged pupils score higher than their overseas counterparts. And the UK as a whole does better than average in science, though not nearly as well as Singapore, Japan or Estonia.

However, overall, the continuing middling result for the UK nations on PISA in maths and reading remains worrying, particularly the very poor Welsh results. This requires strong action to improve classroom teaching, especially for disadvantaged students.

Earlier Sutton Trust research showed how English schools could become one of the top five education performers in the world within 10 years, if the performance of the country’s least effective teachers were brought up to the national average.

So we need far more focus on improving teacher recruitment and the quality of existing teachers, through better professional development, as well as improvements in school leadership. Such changes in standards are more important than the constant structural upheaval that has yet to deliver the promised improvements. That’s PISA’s wake-up call.

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