World Class Education Systems

The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) commissioned McKinsey & Company to develop a comparative fact-base for an analysis of the performance of England’s education system and high-performing systems overseas, drawing on its international benchmarking framework.

Key points:
- The world’s highest-performing education systems share three mutually reinforcing attributes:
1. high challenge: high expectations of pupils and fair evaluation of schools and other parts of the system
2. high support: enough resource and capacity-building to meet those high expectations
3. aligned incentives: incentives and consequences that induce schools and other parts of the system to meet expectations

When benchmarked against international comparators, many school reforms implemented in England are shown to be world-leading. However, they are not yet delivering consistently world-class teaching for every student, in every classroom in every school. Following significant improvements attainment can be seen to be levelling off, and evidence suggests performance still has a stronger link to socio-economic background than is the case in the world’s best systems.

Most aspects of England’s schooling system can be rated as ‘good’, or ‘world-class’. One exception to this pattern is high expectations for student achievement - a key attribute of high performing systems – which is rated as ‘fair’.

There is also evidence that academic content and standards are not fully meeting the demands of employers and universities.

Strengths identified in the English system include:
- Devolution of resources to schools and three year budgets
- A focus on turning round or closing failing schools
- Intervening in poorly performing local authorities
- Reform of teacher training and best practice marketing of teaching as a profession

The analysis identified scope to strengthen performance in other areas, including the consistency of classroom teaching and the quality of professional development, and the ability to codify and scale up best practice.