PISA as an ideational roadmap for policy change: exploring Germany and England in a comparative perspective

Abstract

Education policy has undergone transformation in many countries over the last decade. In this article, we focus on the effects of the most significant international initiative in secondary education, which is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We analyse two countries that provide variation regarding the degree of change in their respective education policy-making due to this study; while Germany substantially reformed its education system in reaction to its mediocre PISA results, almost no change has been observed in England. As we show, alterations and shifts in ideas of education policy best account for such a change.