The coming days risk being, as after each publication of the Pisa report, punctuated by self-flagellation. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) publishes this Tuesday, December 5, the conclusions of its Program for International Student Assessment (Pisa), a three-year study aimed at assessing the performance of 15-year-olds and, thus , different educational systems. As a result of Covid, the previous edition dates from four years ago. Level in maths, social inequalities, well-being at school… Overview of the main lessons from the report.
Since 2018, the decline
The OECD’s findings are clear: “Overall, the 2022 results are among the lowest ever measured by the Pisa survey in all three subjects in France.” The report covers, in each edition, mathematics, reading comprehension and science, each time with a focus on one of these disciplines. This year it’s about math. France maintains its place in the OECD average in all three disciplines, alongside countries such as Hungary, Portugal and Lithuania. She ranks between 15th and 29th place in maths and between 11th and 29th in reading comprehension and science. In the leading group, we find Singapore, Japan, Korea, Estonia, Denmark, Canada and New Zealand.
In maths, the performance of French students has fallen by 21 points since 2018 (to 474 points), compared to -15 points on average in the OECD (to 472 points). This is the decline “the largest observed since the first Pisa study”, more than twenty years ago. Note that countries like Germany, the Netherlands or Poland, better ranked than France, are experiencing greater falls.
In reading comprehension, results fell by 19 points in France compared to 10 points in the OECD. Since 2012, it is 32 points less, compared to 16 on average in the OECD, while the results were stable between 2000 and 2012. In science, finally, the drop is 6 points in France (2 points in the OECD).
A Covid effect and a lack of support from adults
“We will have to dig deeper into the results to try to really understand the reasons for this decline,” says Eric Charbonnier, analyst at the OECD. “There is an undeniable Covid impact”, he said, but which alone cannot explain the French decline, other countries having also been affected by the pandemic. Especially since France has closed its schools less than many others. “We do not see a link between the duration of closures and performance in mathematics”, thus indicates the analyst. There is also no “relationship with the number of students per class. Many Asian countries with many students per class do very well.”
OECD experts look more at the relationship between adolescents and their teachers. “Countries where students feel more supported by their teachers are those where the decline in mathematics is less severe,” assures Eric Charbonnier. Gold “France is one of the countries where students report receiving the least support from their teachers,” at 52% compared to 63% on average in the OECD. Furthermore, indicates Irène Hu, analyst at the OECD, “there has been less parental involvement in monitoring children’s progress since 2018. This may have influenced the decline in performance.”
Countries that are doing well are also potentially the least affected by teacher shortage problems, such as Korea and Japan.
France still champion of inequalities
France remains “one of the OECD countries where the link between the socio-economic status of students and the performance they obtain in Pisa is the strongest”, indicates the OECD in its report. However, the situation is stable, it is not getting worse. In maths, students from advantaged backgrounds obtain results 113 points higher than those of disadvantaged students, when the average gap is 93 in OECD countries. Only Slovakia, Israel, Hungary, Switzerland, Belgium and the Czech Republic do less well.
Students enrolled in vocational tracks (20% of the sample), many more of whom grew up in a disadvantaged environment than others, obtained 90 points less than their peers in general and technological tracks in maths, compared to 59 points lower than their peers in general and technological tracks. gap in the OECD. After smoothing by taking into account the socio-economic background, students in the pro track obtain 45 points less than the others (-14 on average).
15-year-old students in private school had 27 points more than those in the public sector in maths (+24 in the OECD) but, once the socio-economic profile is taken into account, the gap is to the advantage of the public: +21 points, compared to +11 in the OECD. In other words, for the same social background, public students fare better than those in the private sector.
French boys achieved better results in maths than girls, by 10 points, similar to what we see in the OECD on average (9 points difference).
School violence: disparities depending on the environment
Pisa not only questions academic performance, but also a certain number of elements structuring the lives of adolescents. It appears in particular that “School violence has increased very slightly, but France is within the OECD average. This is a real point of vigilance that must be observed in many countries. points out Eric Charbonnier. 9% of French students indicated that they were frequently victims of violence in their school (8% in the OECD), particularly teasing from other students. If we reduce the frequency to “a few times a month”, 24% of girls and 20% of boys say they have suffered school violence in the past year (this is respectively 20 and 21% in the OECD ). Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are more affected, at 26% compared to 18% in advantaged backgrounds. This is 33% in rural areas compared to 19% in towns with more than 100,000 inhabitants.
The level of life satisfaction of French students is 6.77 out of 10 on average, i.e. the OECD average level. A student is considered satisfied between 7 and 10. 16% of adolescents surveyed declared that they were not satisfied with their life, i.e. nine points more than in 2015. Finally, fewer French students than previously felt anxious about mathematics (fear of getting bad grades, feeling lost in solving a problem, etc.).