The significance of international tests and benchmarks in the formulation and evaluation of education policy in the Republic of Ireland is particularly well illustrated in the 2015 publication by the Department of Education and Skills of its plan for “service delivery and reform”. Setting out the vision and mission for the department and some key statistics for the education and training sector in Ireland, the report then notes that “national and international assessments show that Ireland is performing well in a number of areas” (Department of Education and Skills, 2015b, p. 7). The report continues by presenting summaries of Ireland’s performance in international tests and benchmarking exercises, as well as of the progress of students in national sample assessments in reading and mathematics. This emphasis on performance data stands in marked contrast to the observation in a government white paper 20 years earlier that there was a need to “focus more sharply on outcomes and associated measures of performance” (Department of Education, 1995, p. 193). This change over a period of 20 years from a system challenged by the absence of robust evaluation of outcomes to one where such outcomes are central to the presentation and formulation of education policy is the focus of the analysis presented in this paper. The analysis shows that in its first two cycles, PISA (far more influential in Ireland than any other international testing program) provided evidence in the construction of a rationale for reform; in a further stage in the interaction between the results and education policy, PISA results generate an urgency and an impetus for change, but they also shape that change. The influence of these tests is increasing over time in an Irish context. It is difficult to isolate the variables in the complex interaction between the data and the policy, against a backdrop of accelerated changes across developed education systems in the period under discussion. More data from international tests become available in the period under analysis. This alone is likely to have contributed to their greater influence. But it is clear that even though Ireland’s performance in mathematics and science was relatively static, the impact of that performance appeared to accelerate and strengthen. The case of Ireland’s 2009 PISA results in reading demonstrates how a significant (if contested) deterioration in performance pushed the system into an unprecedented cycle of reform.

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