I have written a few posts about the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and, in doing so, I have become aware of a number of myths that are linked to it. These are worth challenging because they get in the way of us taking anything useful from these results. The myths are:

1. We should look to Finland as an exemplary education system

Hardly a month can go by without a glowing newspaper article about education in Finland. This is a worldwide phenomenon. For instance,aDecember 2016 piece in the Hindustan Times suggests that India should copy Finland’s new cross-curricular approach to teaching. Sometimes PISA is not even referenced in these articles. Yet any search for the source of the idea of Finland as an education powerhouse takes us back to Finland’s performance in PISA in the early 2000s.

Some of this is logically baffling. Finland haven’t yet fully…