International studies such as the programme for international student assessment (PISA) provide essential insights into our system’s strengths and highlight opportunities to learn from approaches used in other high-performing countries. The 2022 study, published in December 2023, showed that Northern Ireland pupils continued to significantly outperform the majority of education systems in each subject, as they did in the previous study in 2018. In the most recent study, our pupils significantly outperformed 48 education systems in mathematics, 57 in reading and 49 in science.

The PISA 2022 study was especially important in providing the first results for a comparative international study of academic assessment collected during the pandemic for that cohort of 15-year-old pupils. I place on record my thanks to the 80 participating schools for making that possible in very challenging circumstances. While the score for science in Northern Ireland had not changed significantly since 2018, the scores for both mathematics and reading had declined significantly. It is notable but unsurprising, given the impact of the pandemic, that that was also the case, on average, across OECD countries. While those results show our post-primary system to be a strong performer on the international stage, they also demonstrate that we have more to do.