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What the UK can learn from international schools

Despite Tony Blair’s mantra that what matters is “education, education, education”, the UK has slipped down the league table comparing pupils’ achievements across the OECD over the past decade – even though spending per pupil doubled over that time. A huge study, based on two-hour tests of 500,000 15-year-old schoolchildren, was carried out in 2009 and published this week, offering a comparison of pupils’ achievement in reading, maths and science across 65 developed countries.

Catching up with the best performing school system – Finland – could add trillions of dollars to the UK’s GDP in the medium term, the report concluded. But what factors matter? And how can we make the changes that really count?