They tell a tale of educational decline across the world’s great economies. PISA 2025 records the lowest ever average scores for OECD members in reading, science and mathematics.

Results that shocked us in 2022 in the wake of COVID have been compounded. Any expectation that the world wound bounce back in 2025 has been comprehensively thwarted.

Digging in, there are some fascinating details.

It is now time to stop lauding Finland as the land of educational miracles. Stratospheric scores in 2005 have been followed by almost relentless decline. Finland now posts lower scores than Australia, albeit with the saving grace that the difference is not a significant one.

All those junkets to Helsinki that left dreamy-eyed educationalists waxing lyrical about Finland’s utopian education system appear to have had a perverse effect.

We were told that Finnish teachers held master’s degrees - part inspiration for Australia’s adoption of an expensive and flatulent two-year master’s requirement for our own teachers.

We listened to incorrect assertions that Finnish students sit no standardised tests and that Finnish teachers have high levels of autonomy.

We were told these tales with breathless reforming zeal. And yet, instead of educationalists learning lessons from Finland, Finland appears to have learned from the educationalists and is doing worse as a result.

So far, so depressing, but there are indeed more tantalising findings in these results.

Politicians tend to focus on rankings, but rankings alone are misguided. Countries and states vary in more ways than simply their education systems. It is often better to compare the direction of travel of similar countries that follow different approaches. And that’s where the United Kingdom comes in.

Scotland and Wales have adopted the international consensus on what constitutes a good education system. Instead of boring old facts or the rote regurgitation of mathematical procedures, they have chosen to focus on sexier stuff.

Scotland has developed a Curriculum for Excellence. And who would not want excellence? It specifies the lofty, if rather vague, goals of developing successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors and responsible citizens.

These are then broken down further with effective contributors, for example, able to communicate in different ways, make informed choices and apply critical thinking.

It is as if someone were to list ‘being funny’ as a capacity of an ‘effective comedian’ - it’s true, but not helpful. Wales has trod a similar path in developing its ‘four purposes’ and why should it not when education experts and even the OECD itself have recommended groovier, funkier aims and methods?

In contrast, England has followed a different course. Reforms of the early 2010s recentered the acquisition of knowledge as the core aim of the curriculum. This ‘knowledge-rich’ approach, coupled with a commitment to interactive explicit teaching, has characterised English education ever since.

Rather than group projects and coursework portfolios, English students experience more whole-class teaching and traditional tests and examinations.

This experiment has now run for over a decade and the results are in. While Scotland and Wales have seen their PISA scores slowly decline, England has held relatively stable.

This may not be the case for long. The newly minted minister responsible for English education recently took to social media with the nonsensical claim that, ‘education should be about what you can do, and not what you can’t do’. This is profoundly wrong.

Education is about learning how to do things that students previously could not do. In developing these capacities, students may become motivated about issues they previously knew little about. They are able to see aspects of the world that would otherwise have been obscure to them. Under new management, will England follow its neighbours downhill?

What of Australia? Science has held steady since the last PISA round in 2022, but mathematics and reading have both declined.

Mathematics has been on quite the journey, with the average score declining in every round since 2000. Perhaps the deeply unambitious Australian Curriculum has played a part in that.

If so, tentative moves from ACARA to reform mathematics up to Year 2 should be welcomed and rapidly built upon. Education minister Jason Clare seems to have recognised the need to improve our mathematics curriculum in his comments on the results.

And pleasingly, with one or two exceptions, Australia’s education ministers seem to be learning the lessons from England. Jason Clare has led the way, embracing an explicit teaching approach and this has been pursued in states such as New South Wales and Victoria.

This is our chance to change the trend.