The results for the 2018 round of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) will be released on the third of December. What will they show?

I don’t know, I’m not a fortune teller. However, it will be interesting to see if certain trends, both numerical and rhetorical, will continue. Will Scotland, Australia and Finland continue their general downward trends?

Scotland’s PISA results. Note that the average for countries (sort of) is 500 and that no, it does not make sense to start the y-axis at zero

What about England? Presumably, this will be the first cohort of 15-year-olds impacted by the new, harder GCSE exams. Will that have an effect, no effect or is it too early to tell?

I am mainly interested in trends within individual countries because I do not think the rankings tell us very much and can even mislead. For instance, when the U.K. and…