You may never have heard of Andreas Schleicher, a placid German who wouldn’t look out of place as the reliable engineer in an Audi advert, but he is the most powerful man in global education. An employee of the OECD, he is the man in charge of Pisa, a triennial assessment that measures the performance of children across 65 countries and regions.
Despite OECD warnings that the results are not reliable enough to present as league tables, they always are. And a country’s placing can inflict trauma on national psyches. When Pisa was first released, the Germans were so astonished at their relatively poor results that they invented a new word: Pisa-Schock.
More recently, US officials, finding their pupils in the bottom half of the table, have talked of a “Sputnik moment”. When the latest results were published last week, England’s education secretary Michael Gove and his Labour counterpart Tristram Hunt immediately launched into battle over which party was most to blame for the country’s average performance. Much of Pisa’s power, in the west at least, comes from a sense that it represents a new and frightening geopolitical reality. Last week’s results saw east Asian countries move even further ahead and emerging economies such as Brazil, Indonesia and Turkey on the rise. Meanwhile, the US and western Europe have not improved at all – with the notable exception of Germany. In our nightmares this is what the balance of power looks like 10 or 20 years down the line.