Scottish education performance to be revealed in Pisa report

The state of Scottish education will be laid bare today in a global study of reading, maths and science assessments.

The 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) study will take in results from more than 80 countries.

Expected this morning, the latest paper will cover results from pupils whose education was affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

It focuses on the assessment of 15-year-olds and includes around 690,000 youngsters across all nations included.

All four nations of the UK take part and it comes ahead of the upcoming publication of Achievement of Curriculum for Excellence data for Scottish students.

Last year those figures showed an increase in the level of primary school pupils who were achieving the expected levels of literacy and numeracy.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has warned that this year's Scottish Pisa scores are likely to show a drop in standards.

The economic research body has highlighted that while Scottish pupils did better at maths and science than young people elsewhere in the UK from 2006-12, achieving results that were "well above average" in Pisa tests, this has since gone into decline.

Pisa papers are published every three years. In the 2019 report, Scotland's maths and science scores were the lowest in almost 20 years, while reading performance was better than the average.

Andrew McKendrick, IFS research economist, said: "The performance of Scottish pupils in international Pisa tests has been disappointing, particularly in maths and science. Scotland has gone from a position of high performer to an average performer."

He went on: "Large increases in spending and big reforms such as the Curriculum for Excellence do not seem to have translated into higher performance in these core subjects, though Scottish pupils did perform very well in a test of global competence, which may be measuring the impact of the new curriculum."