BBC Scotland’s latest ‘Scotland is shite’ story is to tell us that Scottish educational performance has fallen behind that of England. This finding is based on Pisa rankings. However BBC Scotland, ahem, ‘forgot’ to mention a critical piece of information in its rush to let viewers know how terrible Scottish education is. That information is that Pisa rankings for English schools are based upon a self-selecting sample of the best performing schools whereas the Scottish rankings are based upon a much more representative sample.
However the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which compiles the Pisa figures cautions against compiling direct league tables of very different educational systems because structural, cultural, and curricular variations make simple international comparisons misleading. That caveat was blithely ignored by BBC Scotland as was another critical difference which makes the Pisa figures all but useless as a comparator for educational performance between Scotland and England.
To quote Professor John Robertson of Talking Up Scotland: “In Scotland 117 schools participated [in the Pisa rankings] (out of a sampled pool, with 96.4% school response rate—exceeding the 85% OECD standard). 3,257 students participated (79.4% weighted student response rate—slightly below the 80% standard). With ten times the population, to meet the same percentage standards. England would have needed around 1 170 schools and 32 570 pupils. Yet it had only 165 (14%) schools and 4 763 (15%) pupils, making its sample then utterly unreliable, meaningless and not comparable with Scotland’s.”
The official report from the PISA 2022 cycle indicates selective participation in England, with higher-performing (or more advantaged) schools and students more likely to respond. This contributed to an upward bias in England’s scores. This pattern of the self-selection of better performing schools or schools in better off areas in England continues and is sufficient to render the English Pisa results meaningless as a measure of educational performance in England and invalid as a yardstick for comparing educational attainment in England with pupil attainment in different educational systems, which is the supposed purpose of the Pisa figures. It’s an exam in which the English educational authorities are cheating.
A study of the Pisa figures by University College London found that England’s real average scores would be 10 to 15 percentage points lower if the samples were perfectly representative. see:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/apr/governments-education-statistics-seriously-flawed
A fundamental rule in any scientific or statistical endeavour is that you have to compare like with like in order to make a meaningful comparison from which significant and consequential conclusions can be drawn. This is particularly the case when the conclusions in question are expected to inform and shape government policy, especially with something as important as children’s education.
This is categorically not what has happened here. Effectively what the Pisa figures have done is to compare all Scottish runners, junior clubs, fun runners, and folk who’ve just taken up running in an effort to lose some weight, with athletes selected to represent England at the Commonwealth Games, and based upon these two wildly different sample groups has proclaimed that the English athletes outperform the Scottish ones. BBC Scotland has then presented these figures at face value and told its viewers and listeners that England’s runners are better than the Scottish ones and that this is due to policy choices of the Scottish Government. Infact the policy choice is the choice of the English educational authorities to permit unrepresentative sampling for the Pisa figures.
Back in reality, none of this means that Scottish runners are doing badly or that there is a structural or governmental problem with Scottish running, the blame for which can be laid at the door of the Scottish Government. It means we are comparing apples with tennis balls.
Basic journalistic integrity means that at the very least BBC Scotland should have highlighted to its viewers that the respective Scottish and English figures upon which it was basing its story are not directly comparable. It did not do so. You don’t have to be a genius to work out that it did not do so because admitting that the Scottish and English figures are not directly comparable would have pulled the rug out from underneath a juicy SNP bad, England’s doing better story with its subtext that this implies that Scotland would be better off under Westminster rule after all. It’s probably a safe bet that if Scotland apparently out-performed England on the basis of statistics which were not directly comparable, BBC Scotland would have been sure to point that out in order to cast doubt on what could have been perceived as a Scottish success.
In its rush to present an SNPbad, Scotland rubbish story about Scottish education, BBC Scotland has failed a basic educational test of its own and gets an F in O grade irony.
To be perfectly clear here, it is entirely possible that with a properly representative sample of English schools in the Pisa rankings, England is still out-performing Scotland. The crucial point however is that this is not a conclusion which it is possible to arrive at on the figures as they have been presented, because these figures do not compare like with like, yet this is the conclusion which BBC Scotland has so loudly trumpeted precisely because it’s a conclusion which suits the political interests of the Labour party in Scotland and its allies in Pacific Quay. Indeed it’s worth pointing out that in Scotland the pass rate for this year’s exams increased whereas in England it dropped. The attainment gap between pupils from poorer versus better off backgrounds continues to narrow in Scotland, particularly in primary education.
The failure of BBC Scotland to tell its viewers the whole story,especially as far as the differences in Pisa sampling between Scotland and England are concerned marks the difference between public service broadcasting and politically motivated propaganda. The contents of this blog are politically motivated but this blog’s political bias is loudly and proudly announced, allowing readers to adjust their expectations accordingly. BBC Scotland however cloaks its pro-unionist bias in a claim to be impartial and politically neutral and moreover demands that we all pay for it under threat of prosecution if we don’t.
BBC Scotland will be dining out on this story for the rest of the week, performing its job of giving anti-independence politicians ammunition with which to attack the Scottish Government at FMQs and giving the anti-independence press the fix of SNPbad/Scotland is shite headlines it needs in order to keep independence at bay.
After wrestling for hours with PayPal, I have finally compiled a list of the emails of almost everyone who makes a regular monthly donation to the blog and will soon launch the weekly bonus premium email article for those who make a monthly contribution to the blog. I had hoped to launch this in June but unfortunately it will be delayed for a while. There are a number of people whose emails I am unable to find. Some people donate monthly by Ko-Fi, one makes a monthly donation to last year’s GoFundMe fundraiser, a few people make monthly payments directly by bank transfer. I cannot access the email addresses of any of these people and so cannot add them to the new mailing list. If you are one of these folk, please email me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com and I’ll add you to the mailing list.
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