PISA 2022: National Report for England. Research Report

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) assesses the knowledge and skills in mathematics, reading and science of 15-year-old pupils in countries around the world. PISA is run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and assessment is typically undertaken every 3 years, allowing us to chart how performance changes over time and across different education systems. PISA 2022, which was undertaken 4 years after the previous cycle due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, involved 81 education systems, including England. In England, 4,763 15-year-old pupils from 165 schools completed a 2-hour computer-based assessment and pupil questionnaire. Headteachers at participating schools were also asked to complete a school questionnaire. The study was carried out in November and December 2022, with most of those pupils who participated completing their GCSE exams in 2023. This report analyses their performance in the three subject domains of mathematics, reading and science, as well as their responses to the pupil questionnaire, and their headteachers' responses to the school questionnaire. When reading this report, it is important to keep in mind that England's sample of participating pupils may not be entirely representative of all 15-year-old pupils in England. This is, to some degree, always the case with international studies such as PISA, but in this case the sample for England did not meet 2 of the 82 PISA Technical Standards. Analysis of the characteristics of the pupils who participated revealed that the final sample had somewhat higher academic attainment on average than the general population and a somewhat lower proportion of pupils who had been eligible for free school meals in the past 6 years. In other words, higher performing pupils may be overrepresented in the final sample and some of the PISA results may therefore be somewhat higher than they might otherwise be. This issue was also a challenge for some of the other participating education systems including several OECD countries. Given that the sample may not be entirely representative of the population, caution is required when interpreting the analysis that is presented in this report, though this does not necessarily translate directly to a particular score being a certain number of points higher than its 'true' value, and the OECD itself makes no adjustments to the scores in any education system in which some of the PISA's Technical Standards were not met. The term 'significant' is used throughout this report to refer to statistically significant differences between scores or values. In this report, we use a '95% confidence level' to define statistical significance. A statistically significant result is one that is not likely to occur by chance, due to the sampling process, and is more likely to be attributable to a genuine difference between groups. Similarly, the term average, as in 'average score', is used to refer to the arithmetic mean for the relevant group, unless stated otherwise.