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Conservative Party: UK education performance plummeted under Labour
New figures have confirmed that the UK's performance in education plummeted during Labour's time in Government.
The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows a marked decline in science, reading and maths between 2000 and 2009. When compared with other OECD countries, UK secondary school pupils fell from fourth to sixteenth in Science, from seventh to 25th in Reading and from eighth to 28th in Maths.
Commenting on the new research, Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, said:
"After 13 years of increased investment in education, when it was a political priority for the last Government, we still fall behind other nations.
"So we have got to ensure that we implement those lessons, and not every lesson here is necessarily comfortable for some people who are heavily invested in old ways of doing things.
"But unless we learn the importance of greater autonomy, sharper accountability, raising the prestige of the teaching profession, dealing with discipline in the bottom 20-25 per cent of schools - unless we do those things, then in three years' time there will be another, even more profound, Pisa shock for this country's politicians."
The PISA assessment is produced every three years. In the 2009 survey, about half a million youngsters took the tests, which are designed to provide an objective measure of their ability in these three key areas.
"The UK's performance is about average," said the OECD's Michael Davidson.
"The question is whether the UK thinks that 'average' is good enough?"
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- conservative party
- uk education