The OECDs PISA results have been used both as an excuse for governments to follow their own agendas in reforming education when national results are considered unsatisfactory and as a vehicle to allow governments to engage in either policy borrowing from those countries deemed to be more successful or policy development through studies which claim to distil the general features from across countries which will help make an education system more successful.

National responses both at the level of policy and its impact on pedagogic practice are mediated by a number of factors which include: (1) dominant education ideologies (such as techno-rationalism, humanism, progressivism, critical citizenship); (2) systemic features and their relation to the state (such as centralisation and federalism, tripartite or comprehensive schools, balance of public and private, historical remnants such as the length of the school day); and (3) the nature and degree of marketization of schools (such as school autonomy, parental choice, diversity of schools, teacher accountability, inspection reports, standardised national tests and league tables).

This paper will analyse the national policy response in England and Germany to the 2012 PISA results whose emphasis was mathematics, and discuss their effects on pedagogic practice. The comparative foci of this study, Germany and England, provide contrasting education cultures and traditions. For the most part, the English education tradition promotes individualised, child-centred teaching and regards children as requiring different types and levels of schooling. Schools in England have been subject to much reform over the past two decades, concentrating mostly on teaching, with teachers’ work subject to considerable surveillance. Parental choice in schools, a policy introduced in the 1990s along with the publication of school performance tables in order to raise educational standards, is more rhetorical than real, although national tests continue to have a huge impact on children’s experiences of school . In recent years this paradigm has also begun to gain ground in Germany. Following the 2002 Pisa ‘shock’, the discourse of global market competitiveness and personal competences emerged to challenge the longstanding humanist tradition. Most recently, whilst some have argued that normative goals like critical judgement and autonomous decision making are important, educational voices have been raised against arguing that content-related goals are a prerequisite to a competent, reflexive modern Bildung. Here, although difficult to translate, Bildung refers to the process of personal formation that brings about the inner development of the individual through education. Hence we can characterise English schooling as largely techno-rationalist, whilst humanism still exerts much influence in Germany.

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