The Open Letter of May 2014 from over 80 international academics to the Director of PISA (Meyer, Zahedi et.al 2014) claims that ‘by emphasizing a narrow range of measurable aspects of education, PISA takes attention away from the less measurable or immeasurable educational objectives’. The OECD response is that PISA assesses an ‘unprecedented range’ of learning outcomes, and that the breadth of the measures covered is continually being extended. This response wrongly implies that we should be relaxed about the backwash of PISA on educational goals pursued in schools. One assumption here is that there is no limit to PISA’s potential for improving the scope of its measurements. That incorrectly assumes that, in every case, if educators make a good case for X being a central educational aim, then reliable PISA tests can be developed to capture whether X is being achieved by pupils. All this ignores the point that certain key educational goals incorporate normative and social elements that, by their very nature, are open to interpretation. Verdicts on such issues are subject to legitimate variation. They are sensitive to features that resist consistent measurement in principle, and any attempts to achieve consistency would distort and diminish the educational goals concerned. Many examples can be found in the humanities, the expressive and performing arts, personal and social education and religious education. In my contribution to the symposium I will justify the above claims. I will explain why some fundamental elements to be found in any education worthy of the name resist consistent assessment in principle, and hence why PISA in its high stakes role threatens educational quality and the well-being of the liberal societies that education is supposed to sustain.

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