There is one modicum of comfort for Scotland in the PISA results that were published on 8 September. Science has bounced back a little from the harm caused by shutting schools during Covid. But this is the minimum that we might have expected if schools have any role at all. If there hadn’t been any recovery in science, then we could have given up on laboratories, expensive equipment, and specialist science teachers, and resorted to teaching science through cartoons or YouTube.
But that’s the end of the good news. Even in science, the recovery between 2022 and 2025 was only back to where we were in 2018. Compared to the PISA results in 2009 – the baseline for assessing the Curriculum for Excellence which started in 2010 – Scottish science results at age 15 are down by the equivalent of 14 months of learning. In the two other domains assessed by PISA – mathematics and reading – there was no recovery at all between 2022 and 2025. Compared to 2009, Scottish 15-year-olds are down by 8 months in reading and by a colossal 19 months in mathematics. Just reflect for a moment on that latter number. It means that 15-year-olds in the third year of secondary school in 2025 have barely gone beyond where they would have been mathematically towards the end of first year two decades ago.
The OECD’s explanation of the collapse in reading standards – a phenomemon in most countries that are included in this study – is that it is due to ‘declining levels of reading for enjoyment’ and the ways in which social media is ‘compromising the ability of students to engage with complex texts and data’. That seems plausible, and is certainly consistent with the highly influential research by the distinguished American psychologist Jonathan Haidt on the harms caused by social media. But this is something that is within our control – banning phones from school, not allowing students to avoid difficult reading, encouraging reading for pleasure. There are plenty of prominent public figures who have attempted to do that, from the late Dolly Parton through Queen Camilla to J. K. Rowling, whose books have achieved more in spreading the habit of reading than any other single writer.
Behind these average numbers are some even more worrying signs that excellence is an increasingly rare quality in Scottish education. The attainment of the best 10% of students in science has been stagnant since 2015. The best 10% in reading have fallen since before the Curriculum for Excellence by the equivalent of nearly 12 months of learning. The fall in the best 10% in mathematics since as recently as 2018 has been by the equivalent of a year.
There is also a problem with socio-economic inequality – social class. The Scottish government’s report on PISA takes comfort from the fact that the social-class gaps here are less than in many other countries, and have weakened in Scotland in recent years. But there are two ways in which inequality of this kind can decline. One is raising the lowest-status up; the other is by bringing down the highest-status. There is a little bit of the former in Scotland, but the main explanation of the weakening gap is the fall of attainment by the children of high-status families. Attacking the middle class may be resonant politics, but is educationally indefensible.
Then there is the comparison with England. In all respects, Scotland shows up badly in this. Indeed, one of the key stories globally about this round of PISA is England’s relative success. England, like Scotland, improved in science. Crucially also, however, it did not fall in mathematics or in reading. At a time when global reading standards are falling of a cliff, England’s resistance of that trend is striking.
England’s success can be put also in terms of global rankings. If we compare Scotland and England with the 37 OECD countries other than the UK, and add in the educationally outstanding Singapore, we find that England is 5th or 6th in this league table of 40 economically developed countries for each PISA domain. Scotland, by contrast, is 11th in reading, 16th in science, and a dismal 21st in mathematics.
So we are back to the fundamental question that comes up every time the Scottish and English education systems have been compared in recent decades. The main difference in educational policy in the past two decades is the curriculum. England has stressed structured knowledge. Scotland has neglected knowledge, and celebrated skills as if skills could exist without knowledge. England is succeeding (unless it is daft enough to overthrow the policy legacy of the last quarter of a century). Scotland is not. The policy lesson is obvious.
Lindsay Paterson is Professor Emeritus of Education Policy at the University of Edinburgh, and author of the recently published Lessons from Scottish Schools: Why Knowledge Matters.