UK education

Because our state education system compares poorly to many of our peers. Look at international league tables and comparisons, our state system is competitive globally on the whole, but poorly compared to Nordic, East Asian and some western European nations.

That said, we have one of the best university sectors and private educational sectors in the world. Arguably we are only behind the US in terms of universities, and even then our top universities are highly competitive with theirs, we just don't have the breadth of high-level institutions that they have, but that makes sense considering our comparative size. I mean, for our size we are the second biggest destination for international students for a reason. Equally our private education sector is very competitive and has a great international reputation (despite its changing nature over the past 20 years).

So for me, its not possible to say that our education system as a whole is bad.. but rather we do have issues with the way we fund and organize our state-run primary and secondary education system, that means its a bit behind where we would like it.

Because our state education system compares poorly to many of our peers. Look at international league tables and comparisons, our state system is competitive globally on the whole, but poorly compared to Nordic, East Asian and some western European nations.

But you are comparing apples with oranges. It is true that in the Pisa tests we don't do so well. But then unlike in other countries we don't drill out students with those tests in mind. And the tests are not aligned with our system.

Now, if you go to China you will observe row after row of obedient students copying down what their teacher tells them. They then learn that knowledge as fact.

By contrast, British students are encouraged to question and challenge their teachers. They are more likely to foster a love of learning rather than learning for learnings sake.

Teaching in the UK is vastly better now than it was in the 90s and before. It is a fool (and that includes the DofE) that judges teaching quality purely on the outcome of international league tables.

For me, it is our creativity as a nation that shows our ional might. The UK is home for many world renouned design, tech and research establishments. You can't feed places like that with the kind of student that comes out of the type of wrote learning environment we seem to be wanting to emulate.

I wouldn't use China as my comparison, as on the whole we are still well above China. In fact their addition to the Pisa tables is still pretty controversial given how the schools in their shanghai inclusion were selected (the way they did it was basically like the 'uk' being only represented by london private schools). Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong kong, are the traditional examples of incredible developed and effective educational programs. In terms of international comparisons though, its not just pisa (although they are the biggest) across the board we come out well overall, but poorly compared to many of the nations we would hope to be competing with.

Your point about questioning, challenging etc. is a good one, but its also one of the reasons we, on average, perform poorly. Freedom within education is pretty well documented to provide the best environment for good students to flourish, but also the worse environment for bad students. On the other hand a highly restrictive environment forces bad students to perform to a certain level while restricting the freedom of good students to explore and excel. For me, when I visit schools in Asia and the Uk, that's exactly what I see in action. The best UK students are some of the best in the world, hence why you rightly say many go on to do great things... but equally we have a big academic-underclass who are far behind their peers in other nations, because in such a free and questioning environment they fall by the wayside. They don't have the maturity or composure to manage on their own, and the educational environment and culture (from their parents as well as their schools) is not sufficiently strict to force them to learn properly, so they check out of education effectively at a very young age.

This then for me explain somewhat why we do poorly in international comparisons, Our private school students, and the top students in our state schools are highly competitive, but we have a system that fails the lower end badly compared to our international peers. And it seems like to solve that you have to go either one of two ways. Either you go the Nordic way, and massively fund social services/support systems far more then we do currently... or you go the east asian way and enforce a culture of strict discipline and respect throughout education that forces them in line at least until they are 18. Given how hard it is to change a culture, were I in charge of the Uk I would be heading in the nordic way rather than trying to copy maths education from shanghai without a clue about the culture that enables it to work so well over there (as many UK schools do)

Why do many people in the UK, consider the UK education system to be bad?