Interpreting the results from the PISA assessment on collaborative skills is both heartening and worrying at the same time. It is a new assessment and one brought about by the realisation that fitness for work in modern societies depends on high level social skills and the ability to work in teams to solve complex problems. It’s an insight that our government has completely failed to recognize.
But our schools are clearly making headway on developing collaborative, team-working skills against the drift of government interest and policy. So much so, that our assessment score exceeds those which might be expected given the average of our science and math scores.
One in eight students (12%) in the United Kingdom achieves Level 4, the top level of proficiency in collaborative problem solving. These students can carry out advanced problem solving tasks with high collaboration complexity, maintain an awareness of group dynamics, and take the initiative to perform actions or make requests to overcome obstacles and resolve disagreements. On average across OECD countries, only 8% of students can perform at this level.
Only 22% of students have minimal collaborative skills, which believe it or not is better than other OECD countries where it is 28%. These students, as the report explains, are at best able to complete tasks with low problem complexity and limited collaboration complexity.
We are operating at a level similar to that of the US and Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands but are only 12-16th in the list of all participating countries. This isn’t good for the world’s fifth largest economy but being on a parallel level with our two main competitors somewhat mitigates the concerns. Or does it? Both economies have much stronger manufacturing bases than the UK, and the manual jobs within this sector traditionally require less social skills. US education, in particular, is emerging from a very individualistic, traditional, instructor led system with state and federal government now pushing hard on Common Core Standards which prioritises problem-solving and collaborative skills.
The fact that three of the five largest economies have sluggish, slow-to-modernise education systems probably reflects a level of complacency in government about responding to the technical and social changes on the horizon. This is certainly true of the UK. It is also borne out by the fact that the top four countries were from the East and include China, which is supposed to have a very didactic teaching tradition. Singapore is well up there, as is Japan.