How England keeps importing other countries’ success stories — and leaving the essential ingredients behind. You can hear the podcast below the blog,
The illusionist’s trick relies on keeping the eye on the reveal while the mechanism stays in the dark. Education policy has a similar appetite for theatre. We seize on headline triumphs from overseas, hold up the finished product as proof of a policy’s genius, and skip the scaffolding, the selected intake and the cultural conditions that actually did the heavy lifting.
Ed Conway, Sky News economics editor, traces that habit in “Material World” through “our” local seafood. Fish caught in the North Sea is offloaded in Zeebrugge, shipped to China for processing, and returned to British supermarkets in packaging that hints at green, local provenance. It arrives on the plate as our fish fingers, a very British dish, even though the work was done elsewhere, under different rules. Education in England has been playing a version of that game for years: import the spectacular result, put a local label on it, and pretend the outcome can be copied by adopting the one technique that showed up in the photograph.
When Shanghai dominated the PISA tables, English officials brought over Chinese teachers and rolled out “teaching for mastery” in primary schools. What the press releases left out was that those scores came from wealthy, highly selected urban jurisdictions, and from samples that excluded large numbers of migrant children, many of whom, under household registration rules, could not progress through the city’s senior schools in the same way as local pupils. We did not import a national method. We marketed a regional outlier as if it were a wand that would work anywhere.
Something similar happened with the “Finnish miracle.” Their system, built on high teacher trust, little standardised testing and broad professional autonomy, was stripped of that context and used to justify whatever reform the speaker already favoured. The corporate world offered its own version in the myth of the “digital native.” Marc Prensky’s claim was that children raised with screens had fundamentally rewired brains and therefore needed digital-first teaching. Commercial enthusiasm was quickly rebranded as educational science. Systematic reviews keep reminding us that handing a pupil a tablet does not, by itself, improve learning, and that children do not possess an innate superiority in digital reasoning simply by virtue of their birth year. Sweden, once the poster child for classroom digitisation, has been turning back toward printed textbooks, handwriting and direct instruction after seeing reading comprehension dip.
Homogenising the advice does not work either. Doug Lemov’s “Teach Like a Champion” has had a long run in English schools, often as a way of looking Ofsted-ready. The techniques were honed in a particular kind of American classroom, mostly with older pupils. Try the first five: set and communicate high academic expectations; ask students to explain their reasoning, not just give answers; use frequent checks for understanding; make students do the intellectual work; use precise, academic language. You can see a shadow of that falling on a secondary lesson. It is not how you encourage a broad spectrum of six-year-olds to play nicely as they enter formal education.
The latest chapter is the 2025 PISA results. Headlines say English pupils have pulled ahead of the rest of the UK in reading, maths and science, even as global reading skills slip and teenagers struggle to judge what they meet online. The relative position is fair enough. The scores underneath are less dramatic than the billing: science up, reading barely moved, maths flat. England looks stronger in part because others have fallen, perhaps more accurately, the country has dropped only a little rather than a lot!
Georgia Gould has pointed to high-performing Estonia as proof that technical subjects from fourteen can sit comfortably alongside academic rigour. Estonia’s PISA scores were earned in a comprehensive basic school, with a later start and far less testing — not on a vocational track that begins at fourteen. Estonia does have vocational routes, but they open mainly after basic school. Borrowing a single glowing light of high academic achievement, tying it to the offer of technical courses at fourteen, and expecting it to yield the Estonian model of success leaves the actual groundwork of building that system untouched.
That distinction, between the borrowed headline and the earned result, is one I recognise from somewhere closer to home than PISA tables. Back in the early 1990s, when I stepped in to help develop Maidenhead Mini Rugby, the success was built on welcoming any keen dads willing to help, then putting them through a fairly robust coach-training regime. The section grew from 28 to over 200 over the rest of that decade. Down at Phoenix Club on Sunday, the first day of the new season, the minis, the juniors and the adult women were all turning out on the fields of glory, with highly experienced coaches everywhere — graduates from their playing careers now giving back. There were no gimmicks, no “the Springboks do it this way,” just a grassroots community club doing the right thing right, and covering the age groups from five-year-olds to grown-ups. That is provenance you can trust, because you can see the conditions that produced it.
Which brings us to the structural flaw at home. The criticism of the English system is not that it fails every child outright, but that it operates like a world supplied only with right-handed scissors. For the academically inclined child on the clear line from GCSEs to A-levels and university, the tool fits well enough. For those who learn differently, the fit is awkward. Vocationally minded young people are still funnelled into lower-status alternatives. Children with special educational needs and disabilities meet provision that is chronically delayed, fragmented or poorly adapted. Plenty of children need a different fit: language, culture, neurology, behaviour, or simply a brain that does not take the standard route. Too often they are marked down for the difference, not measured on what they can do. Recent inquiries into outcomes for white working-class children underline the same disconnect: decades of top-down initiatives have not offered a meaningful route for those outside the preferred mould.
Labels can help schools recognise genuine differences in how children learn. They can also confuse support with lowered expectations. A child may need understanding and adjustment without being defined by a condition, or told that effort and progress are beyond them. Privately commissioned reports sometimes pathologise ordinary differences, while children with severe and complex needs still struggle to secure specialist support. The issue is not whether those differences are real. It is whether the language meant to help is beginning to obscure need, narrow expectation, and divert attention from those who require the greatest support.
A school system can produce a respectable PISA line and still disadvantage large groups of pupils whose strengths fall outside its design. Real progress is not achieved by borrowing another country’s headline, or by trusting that screen light will replace good pedagogy. It requires us to look at the machinery we actually have.
I’ll close with despair first. Just after sixth-form and secondary results days, the papers were ramping up the hype on which school did best, splitting state and private into separate league tables. Of course it is right to celebrate. And guess what? The best results came from the most selective or expensive sets of right-handed scissors in the country.
Where does the optimism show through? Everyone in the learning space knows this, and what is drummed into teachers and coaches alike is that children learn best from each other when there are good instructors around them. England’s performance in the recent football World Cup was only that good because we selected almost all the right players — as a Chelsea supporter, I’d have taken Cole Palmer too. But the national team can only excel because the local community clubs kept producing players worth selecting in the first place. Stop advertising the value of shortcuts and magic tricks. Learning is hard. Glamourise it all you like, but a spade is a spade: adults and young people need to dig in to make sure everyone is included, and when the job needs a bloody shovel, use one — don’t parcel the work out elsewhere and keep our fingers crossed.
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