Jenny Gilruth, former Modern Studies teacher, on Scotland’s falling PISA scores: the problem isn’t our results, it’s the test. Let’s hope the OECD changes it. So, the Deputy FM’s answer to Scotland trailing England in PISA: wait for the OECD to stop measuring what Scottish pupils can’t do. 🙄🤦‍♂️ Her union counterpart Andrea Bradley, head of the EIS, another captured institution, claims that PISA rewards “memorisation and rote learning.” She couldn't be more wrong if she tried. PISA is built to do the opposite. The OECD designed it to test whether 15-year-olds can apply what they know to unfamiliar, real-world problems, and it deliberately avoids testing any particular national syllabus. If any international test should suit a skills-and-capacities curriculum like CfE, it’s PISA. So “cheap learning rather than deep learning” doesn’t really work as an explanation for England’s results. The more plausible reading is the one Gilruth half-concedes: you need a solid base of knowledge before you can apply it, which the CfE doesn't produce. There’s also a consistency problem. Scotland performed well in the early PISA rounds (pre-SNP/CfE), and nobody in Scottish education called the OECD a marketing operation then. The test hasn’t changed its purpose. Scotland’s results did.