Pupils in England have risen up the international rankings for maths, placing England as one of the top performing countries in the western world, according to the PISA 2022 national report for England.
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international assessment of 15-year-olds’ mathematics, reading and science ability, which is widely accepted as the international benchmark for academic attainment for secondary school pupils.
The results show that England has ranked 13th for both reading and science, having been placed at 14th and 13th respectively in 2018 and 25th and 16th in 2009.
Pupils in England achieved a mean PISA mathematics score of 492 in 2022, significantly higher than the OECD average score of 472. Pupils in 8 of the education systems which participated in PISA 2022 mathematics assessment achieved an average score that was significantly above that of England, with a further 9 education systems having scores that were not significantly different, and pupils in the remaining 62 education systems scoring significantly below those in England on average.
For PISA 2022, performance in mathematics was, on average, lower across the OECD in comparison to average performance for PISA 2018. It seems probable that the COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on the performance of pupils around the world.