When I think of Michael Gove perusing the latest PISA league tables, proving yet again that his education reforms have transformed the life chances of English schoolchildren, a line from Broadcast News, the 1987 romcom, comes to mind.
“It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you’re the smartest person in the room,” says a veteran television news man to a young female producer.
“No,” she replies. “It’s awful.”
When it comes to teaching and learning, the man who ran the Department for Education from 2010–14 really does know better. As he has pointed out, a natural experiment has taken place in Great Britain over the last 16 years – longer, if you date the beginning of the reform programme to the Labour and Skills Act 2000 – with England implementing a raft of educational reforms and Scotland and Wales stubbornly sticking to the same old failed formula. The results in the just-published 2025 PISA data are there for all to see.
English 15 year-olds scored 492 in maths, 497 in reading and 516 in science – 29, 36 and 34 points respectively above the OECD average. England now sits comfortably in the upper reaches of the developed world, having climbed into the top 10 in all three subjects.
Wales, by contrast, has fallen below the OECD average, its maths score declining a full 10 points since 2022. Scotland, though still nominally above the international average, has flatlined since its own dismal 2022 showing and now trails England by roughly a year’s worth of learning. Just think about that: in Scotland, the average child is a year behind his English counterparts. (In Wales, they are two years behind.)
So Lord Gove has been vindicated. But knowing he was right won’t be much comfort, given the resistance to his reforms in the devolved nations. No free schools, no academies, no ‘comprehensive grammars’. No phonics, no spelling and grammar tests, no maths mastery, no EBacc, no Progress 8. Just the same old romantic dross – ‘problem solving’, ‘transferable skills’, ‘child-centred learning’ – that has failed Scottish and Welsh schoolchildren for decades.
Instead of replicating Westminster’s knowledge-rich curriculum, Edinburgh and Cardiff rolled out a skills-based “curriculum for excellence”. Even today, in spite of the overwhelming evidence of its failure, the SNP Education Secretary, Màiri McAllan, is still defending this rag-bag of progressive clichés.
Scotland’s education system, she said in response to the latest PISA figures, looks at “artistic expression, problem solving and moral education” so it produces “well-rounded individuals who are ready and capable to be resilient in this world”. Not so ready and capable, Màiri, if they can’t read, write or add up. As Gove rightly concluded, there’s no evidence schools can teach artistic expression, problem solving or character traits like resilience, so it’s better to focus on what they can teach.
The unions have a lot to answer for. In England, it was a standing joke among education reformers in the early 2010s that the ‘n’ in the NUT stood for ‘no’ because England’s largest teaching union had blocked every reform for the last 50 years. Gove and his trusted lieutenants like Nick Gibb faced down the NUT and drove through his reforms in the teeth of ferocious opposition. But his Scottish and Welsh counterparts weren’t so robust, quickly abandoning any effort to overhaul their failing schools when the unions objected.
Some of this can be explained by not wanting to copy what the hated Tories were doing down south. But even when the OECD recommended Scotland reproduce some of the measures that were clearly succeeding in England – a pared-down academic core, greater headteacher autonomy, stricter behaviour management policies, more rigorous assessment – the EIS, Scotland’s largest teaching union, threw up its arms in horror. Each time Scottish education ministers have so much as gestured towards reform, the union has treated it as an act of war.
All of which must be profoundly depressing for Lord Gove. What more do you need? he must be thinking. Worse, the current Labour Government is in the process of dismantling the Gove reforms. Incredibly, Bridget Phillipson and now Lucy Powell have looked at the PISA data and concluded that England’s education system should be more like that of Scotland and Wales – less school autonomy, no more free schools, continuous assessment instead of rigorous exams, toothless behaviour policies, and a neutered Ofsted. At the heart of Labour’s new national curriculum, we’re told, will be ‘sustainability’ and ‘decolonisation’.
The blob is back and the smartest man in the room must be reluctantly concluding that no amount of evidence will convince his opponents he was right.
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Isn’t it a shame the one person who has experienced the best student outcomes in her teaching methods, gets ignored by your silly gov’t. Katherine Birbalsingh of the Michaela Inner. It’s London School, should be the top name that comes forward any time the subject of education is discussed. She is recognised as an education leader, but does NOT get the recognition she deserves from the silly gov’ts you continually vote for.
The Fabians and cultural Marxists in Labour don’t base their policies on evidence. It’s all ideological …. and they want to create a socialist utopia.
The problem is that it never has worked and it never will. But they’d rather destroy what does work than accept that they are wrong.
Frankly I wish schools would also teach critical thinking, because modern parents certainly don’t seem to. Most of today’s adults seem woefully incapable of understanding even the most basic logic, when it comes to subjects like economics. Mind you they’d have to be way better at teaching it than my grandsons new secondary school seems to be. On Day One they asked students to say “what one thing would make a perfect world?” What kind of educator says that? There is and can be no perfect world. That’s the whole point. Anyway yes, Gove was brilliant in Education. Far more dangerous in Housing, where he made possible the undermining of the whole notion of private property and the subsequent collapse of the private rental market, which has happened with the cancellation of Section 21 no fault evictions under Labour’s Renters Rights Act. Labour may have passed the law, but he made anti landlord prejudice respectable and paved the way for it. Massive lack of critical thinking.
That wretched David Cameron threw Gove under the bus when Gove was education secretary. Cameron couldn’t be arsed to fight with the teaching unions who hated what Gove was trying to do. I don’t have a lot of time for Gove, but about education he was dead right.
I’m sure Gove enjoyed his Brexit revenge …. throwing Cameron under the bus along with the EU.
No recitation of facts will undermine matters of belief.
“What More Evidence Does the Blob Need That Michael Gove Was Right?”
Belief (religion) is not evidence based. Therefore no amount of evidence can change belief.
I am not however impressed by the “high scores” achieved these days. From what I have seen of GCSE questions, they are easier than the ones we were set in the 1950s/60s for the 11+ and certainly not the same standard of GCE exams.
My observation is the young in general have poor literacy and numeracy skills, have weak intellects, lack intelligent in-depth thought, lack curiosity and motivation to self-teach and learn more. Consequently they just accept anything they are told, unfiltered by scepticism and critical analysis.
Agreed. And slightly as an aside to the subject of PISA etc. …
Regarding my earlier comment about the French system, I believe that the performance of French children, in common with the performance of most children distracted by instant smartphone gratification, has dropped. But the difference is probably that while the British system has lowered its expectations, the French system is not patronising its youth in this way, so France appears to be doing worse.
“As Gove rightly concluded, there’s no evidence schools can teach artistic expression, problem solving or character traits like resilience, so it’s better to focus on what they can teach.”
I agree 100% with that. Character traits rest with the parents, basic “cold” skills with the teachers.
However… I not convinced… the PISA report, in my honest opinion, just as with most official measures of “quality”, merely indicates which countries’ education monoliths are better at gaming the flawed PISA system which rewards the following of essentially arbitrary rules and processes. 2022, France was apparently languishing in position 26, yet it is as clear as daylight to me that the quality of French education is better than the UK’s. France just can’t be bothered with an imposed system of measuring, and it doesn’t care how it stands on the “world stage”, nor does it care about being “world beating”. It just gets on with it, values critical thinking (yes, really, as much as is possible in a state education system) and is not bothered that France perhaps has a reputation of being “lazy”. Quite the contrary, you see, they are just not bothered about running around looking busy.
Regardless… as with… Read more »
I think the PISA scores are useful … to a degree. The fact that they are clearly picking up the education failures in Scotland and Wales shows they have some merit.
However, I suspect the point you make about France is not far from the truth either.
PISA can’t be entirely useless, I suppose… even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day.
What evidence is there that the blob wants a well educated populace?
Well indoctrinated, not well educated.
Its sad, they the blob pull the ladder up so that the children of this Country become the future uneducated Eloi, Why?
I think your question presupposes that they should want the best for everyone. But I just don’t understand how people have come to think this way.
We seem to be living in a unique period and place in human history where the mass of the population seem to have fallen into this bizarre delusion that the ruling authority wants the best for them.
I’m pretty sure never before in history has a population thought such a ridiculous thought.
The ruling authority wants what is best for itself, which has always meant keeping the masses under control – by violent means if necessary – and milking them like cows. Nothing has changed.
Maybe for a period in the 20th century radio and TV allowed the ruling authority to brainwash the population like never before and now with internet and social media the spell is being broken. (For some.)
That’s why the welfare-state, NHS, public services under State-control is for to pretend the State has everyone’s best interests at heart, and nobody can do without the State.
All about power and control – and a dozy majority want it so.
Control.