Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Don’t reduce class sizes: the OECD’s lessons for education in the UK

So much of the education debate is about how UK schools perform relative to those in other countries – this week Liz Truss reported back from her visit to Shanghai – so when MPs on the Education Select Committee grilled Andreas Schleicher, the Deputy Director of the OECD which ranks education systems worldwide, they were keen to find out what his data suggests is causing the gap in performance between children in UK schools and those in cities such as Shanghai and countries such as Singapore.

Schleicher made a number of interesting points about our education system which are worth mulling:

1. Even the vast improvements in London schools haven’t brought them up to the standard of far east education systems. 

Some of the Labour MPs on the committee – and Liberal Democrat David Ward – were grizzling about the way the OECD makes its comparisons. Schleicher told the committee that the organisation compares children from similar backgrounds so that an education system’s impact on deprivation can be properly studied, rather than results simply reflecting the affluence of the various countries in question.

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