John Jerrim - PISA 2025 results

In this episode, we speak again to John Jerrim. He is Professor of Education and Social Statistics and Director of the Quantitative Social Science Research Centre at UCL Institute of Education. Last year, John was Chalk & Change's first interviewee, discussing his special subject: international tests and what we can and can't learn from them. By request, he returned to discuss the results of the 2025 PISA tests which were released in early September. We discussed what had surprised him, what trends are emerging, and how robust these results are. We discussed: What difference it makes to ask whether a student has "skipped" or has "missed" schoolHow well his predictions for PISA 2025 had held upHow valid English PISA results areWhat the government should be doing to validate the data - and isn'tThe role AI is playing in his work It's early days in understanding the results: "the bomb has hit," as John put it, and now it's up to people like him to interrogate the data and find out what it really shows. But having made predictions last time we spoke, this proved a great opportunity to revisit them and try to make sense of England's recent successes.