Today’s jobs market is highly competitive and globalised. It is no longer enough simply to see if we are doing better than we did last year, or the year before, or 10 years ago.
Far better to judge how we are doing against other countries – for our young people will be fighting for jobs against their peers from Singapore and China, from Canada and the US, from Sweden and Slovenia.That is why I such set stock by international league tables, and of analysis of them. We see how we compare against others – and we discover who we must learn from.
So it is enormously worrying when respected researchers say that our brightest pupils, on a par with their peers in the world-leading education systems of the Far East at age 10, have fallen two years behind them by age 16.
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