Toby Young Toby Young

Must try harder: Labour wants to reverse a decade of progress in education

If education rather than Brexit or the NHS was the biggest issue in this election campaign, the Tories would be coasting to victory. On Tuesday, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) published its latest rankings, based on tests taken by 15-year-olds in 79 countries, and they show the UK climbing the international league tables. In reading, we’re now 14th (up eight places from 2015); in science, 14th (up a place); and in maths, 18th (up nine places). In other words, British schoolchildren are making huge strides compared to those in other countries. And over a period where money has been pretty tight. Why, then, would you want to overhaul our education system, as the Labour party is proposing to do?

Of course, the picture is more complicated than it seems because education is a devolved area. But if you look at the UK’s four different education systems, the one doing the best is England’s and it’s no coincidence that the Conservatives have been in charge of England’s education policy since 2010 (with some interference by the Lib Dems). Across all three subject areas — reading, science and maths — English schoolchildren are now outperforming their Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish counterparts. And the further you go back, i.e. the closer you get to the period when Labour was in charge, the worse English children did. In 2009, for instance, England was ranked third among the four nations in maths and reading. Yet, incredibly, Jeremy Corbyn wants to reverse all the education reforms that have been made since 2010.

To get a sense of what England’s education system would be like under Labour, look at Wales, where the party has been in charge since 1999. Wales has been the worst performer in the UK since Pisa started testing schoolchildren in 2000 and is now the only British nation to be below the international average in all three subject areas.

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