Lies, damned lies, and spin

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The Department for Education (DfE) issued a press report this week entitled “England's 15-year-olds' reading is more than a year behind the best”. The conclusions were taken from analysis of data from the PISA 2009 study, an OECD survey of 15-year-olds in the principal industrialised countries.

The DfE report paints a dire picture: “GCSE pupils' reading is more than a year behind the standard of their peers in Shanghai, Korea and Finland….Fifteen-year-olds in England are also at least six months behind those in Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, Japan and Australia, according to the Department for Education's (DfE) analysis of the OECD's 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study.” The report goes on to talk of England slipping behind other nations in reading.

Schools Minister Nick Gibb is quoted as saying: “The gulf between our 15-year-olds' reading abilities and those from other countries is stark – a gap that starts to open in the very first few years of a child's education.”

I started to smell a rat when I looked at a chart in the report, entitled “Attainment gap between England and the countries performing significantly better than England” (my emphasis). This seemed an odd kind of chart to provide if one wanted to evaluate how England is doing compared to other countries. So I turned to the report provided by the people who did the survey.

Here are some salient points taken verbatim from their summary on reading:

• Twelve countries had mean scores for reading which were significantly higher than that of England. In 14 countries the difference in mean scores from that in England was not statistically significant. Thirty-eight countries had mean scores that were significantly lower than England.
• The mean score for reading in England was slightly above the OECD average but this difference was not statistically significant.
• England’s performance in 2009 does not differ greatly from that in the last PISA survey in 2006.

There is, of course, no problem with aiming high and wanting our children to be among the top achievers in the world. But that’s no excuse for the DfE's mendacious manipulation of information.

Reference

Bradshaw, J., Ager, R., Burge, B. and Wheater, R. (2010). PISA 2009: Achievement of 15-Year-Olds in England. Slough: NFER.