English 15-year-olds' reading is more than a year behind the standard of teenagers in Shanghai, according to new analysis.
A study by the Department for Education suggests an English pupil who achieved eight Cs at GCSE would have to score 3As and 5Bs to match the attainment of their peers in Shanghai.
The analysis indicates that English pupils are also at least a year behind the reading standard of their counterparts in South Korea and Finland. Fifteen-year-olds in England are also at least six months behind those in Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada and New Zealand.
Commenting on the findings, the schools minister, Nick Gibb, said: "The gulf between our 15-year-olds' reading abilities and those from other countries is stark – a gap that starts to open in the very first few years of a child's education. The government's focus on raising standards of reading in the early years of primary school is key to closing that gap."
From next summer, six-year-olds in England will be given a new reading test, checking their ability to read using phonics, a technique based on sounding out letters and groups of letters.
There will also be a new spelling and punctuation test for 11-year-olds, to be introduced in 2013. From next September, pupils taking English language GCSEs will lose marks for poor grammar and spelling.
An endowment fund set up by the government will on Wednesday announce a £50,000 grant to run five summer camps for about 1,000 pupils from disadvantaged homes. The camps will offer classes in literacy and maths as well as music and sport.
The government's findings are drawn from an analysis of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's research.
The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) involved numeracy, literacy and science tests of about 470,000 15-year-olds around the world in 2009.
The latest Pisa study found that the UK performed around the average among OECD countries for reading and maths, and above average for science.
The highest performing region across all the tests was Shanghai, with a mean score of 556. The second highest scoring was Korea with 539, and Finland was third, with 536.
The OECD, a thinktank, says the Chinese education system is focused on passing exams. Students work long days and at weekends to carry out additional exam preparation, while private tutorials are considered a household necessity.
The OECD says: "There is a general belief that [the] emphasis on examinations jeopardises the genuine development of young people and is detrimental ... but few effective solutions have emerged to reduce or minimise examination pressures."
In contrast, children in Finland receive fewer hours of instruction than students in any other OECD country. The Finnish system is based on recruiting talented graduates as teachers and then giving them freedom to decide how they will teach. There is also a political consensus governing education: Finland has an entirely comprehensive system with no private schools and no selection below the age of 16.
Finnish classrooms take a child-centred approach. The OECD says: "Students [in Finland] are expected to take an active role in designing their own learning activities.
"Students are expected to work collaboratively in teams on projects, and there is a substantial focus on projects that cut across traditional subject or disciplinary lines. By the time students enrol in upper secondary school, they are expected to be able to take sufficient charge of their own learning to be able to design their own individual programme.
"Upper secondary schools are now mostly based on individual study plans."
News By:
guardian.co.uk
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