An international study published on December 7 indicates that the reading skills of British secondary school pupils have fallen behind those of children living in France and Germany. Attempts to raise standards to match the best — South Korea and Finland, among members of the OECD, a club of rich nations — have yielded little. Slowly but surely, Britain is sliding down the educational league tables.Every three years the OECD tests the academic abilities of 15-year-old children in member states and some other countries. The aim is to discover not what pupils know but how well they can manipulate what they have learned in reading, mathematics and science. British pupils fare relatively well in science, performing better than the OECD average, but in reading and mathematics they are mediocre. Moreover the tail of underachievement is long and cannot be explained away by immigration: around a fifth of British students cannot read properly and a similar number are flummoxed by simple sums. In the highest-achieving OECD countries, just 7 percent of pupils fail to grasp the basics.
The study shows that many countries get excellent results without spending much money, whereas others such as Britain have splurged to no avail. According to Andreas Schleicher of the OECD, only 9 percent of the variation in achievement can be explained by how much is spent; the rest is down to how it is spent. High-achieving countries have large classes taught by great teachers. Poor performers employ less effective teachers for smaller classes, recruiting the extra staff from further down the ability range.
Though ever greater proportions of British students are passing exams and progressing to university, those tested by the OECD in 2009 did slightly worse than their predecessors in 2006 and much worse than those in 2000. That is almost entirely due to poor performance in Wales, where pass rates in school-leaving exams have also been falling compared with other parts of Britain. Simon Burgess of the University of Bristol blames the slump on the devolved Welsh assemblys decision to stop putting out school league tables.
Helpfully, the study contains insights into how the systems that educate pupils best differ from the rest. They have raised teachers status by making it harder to become and remain one. They publish individual schools results, and allow the best more autonomy than the others. These lessons have been learned by Michael Gove, the education secretary, and now top his to-do list.

(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)