Veterans of mid-noughties Finland mania may look askance at any PIRLS/PISA-based boosterism of a national education system. After all, in the wake of Finland’s stellar performance on the inaugural round of PISA testing in 2003, a whole industry sprang up devoted to studying, venerating, and emulating the purported drivers of Finnish excellence. Yet as of 2022—the latest round of PISA testing—Finland’s performance had declined more than any other country.
The case of Finland is a good reminder of Jay Greene’s maxim that “best practices are the worst” and that selecting on the dependent variable (i.e., studying only successful cases when attempting to discern the drivers of success) is sloppy social science.
But the English story differs in at least three respects from the just-so tales and spurious projections onto domestic debates that Finland engendered some 15 years ago. And Gibb and Peal’s Reforming Lessons is not just a bit of post-hoc self-aggrandizement from a retired politician and his former factotum.
First, a hallmark of good social science is the “pre-registration” of hypotheses before experimentation. Unlike Finland, the authors of England’s reforms posited their theory of change ex ante. Gibb, together with Michael Gove (the Secretary of State for Education until 2014), assumed office in 2010 with a detailed program for reform. The key planks of the plan included raising entry standards for publicly funded teacher training programs and the expansion of Teach First (the British analog of Teach for America); mandating systematic synthetic phonics; adopting a K–12 curriculum organized around recognized disciplines and bodies of knowledge; overhauling examinations and accountability measures and norming them to the most rigorous education systems worldwide; promoting teacher-led, explicit instruction; supporting stronger school discipline; and a massive expansion of academies and free schools (akin to charters).
by Nick Gibb and Robert Peal
Routledge, 2025, $21.59, 262 pages
Undergirding this platform was an abiding conviction that a “Rousseauian ideology of progressive education was the fundamental problem in English schools. From the teaching of reading and maths, to the content of the wider curriculum, to pedagogy in the classroom, not to mention classroom configuration and behavior policy, ideological progressivism was driving practice. And it was failing.” Overhauling this orthodoxy, they posited, would arrest England’s “slide down the world league tables in reading, mathematics and science.”
In Finland, by contrast, no such evaluation or responsive action took place. In the wake of its 2003 PISA triumph, prominent exponents of the Finnish model blithely asserted that they “never set out to win a high ranking among the nations. That just happened.” Finland’s performance nonetheless occasioned no shortage of post-facto explanation—much of it unsubstantiated, if not entirely spurious.
Second, the English system steadily improved over more than a decade, and this improvement aligns temporally with the major reforms of the Gibb-Gove era. Finnish mania, on the other hand, was sparked by a single snapshot (the 2003 PISA results) from which no solid causal inferences could be drawn.
Finally, comparative data further bolsters the claim that Gibb and co.’s reforms positively affected the quality of English schools. Between 2010 and 2024, the constituent nations of the United Kingdom ran something of a natural experiment in education policy. While England embraced phonics, a knowledge-rich curriculum, explicit teacher-led instruction, and greater school autonomy, Scotland and Wales eschewed the evidence on early literacy instruction, doubled down on national curricula focused on the acquisition of amorphous “generalizable” skills, and promoted self-directed “discovery” learning as state of the art. During this period, the international metrics show that England forged ahead, while its fellow home nations stagnated (see Figure 2).
Strangely, London’s gritty outer boroughs and the dowdy post-industrial towns of northern England haven’t attracted the same levels of edu-tourism and breathless fascination that Finland garnered in its heyday. That’s probably for the best. But aspiring reformers the world over would do well to familiarize themselves with the English example. Indeed, several already have to apparently good effect. What, then, are the key English lessons?
