Canada is the only member nation of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD) that does not have a national department of education. Education is the responsibility of its ten provinces and three territories, and this responsibility is shared between central departments of education and local school boards. Canadian provinces have been active participants in international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) such as the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement’s (IEA) Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Participation in these assessments is coordinated by the Canadian Council for Ministers of Education (CMEC), which has provided a federal forum in which to broker a ‘de facto pan-Canadian education policy framework’ (Wallner, 2012, 851). CMEC also administers the national Pan-Canadian Assessment Programme. Reports on Canadian schooling performance in the media and by international organisations, based on numbers generated by ILSAs, have represented Canadian education performance as having common features nationally. The paper will examine the construction of an ‘imagined national’ (Anderson, 2006) space of Canadian education through (a) the generation of numbers that enable national and international comparisons; and (b) reports that discuss the educational performance of the nation, rather than specific provinces and territories. Two sets of documents will be analysed: (1) media articles reporting on Canadian performance in PISA and (2) OECD reports on Canadian education. Interview data relating to the management of national and international assessments by CMEC will also be analysed. Following Lawn (2013), we argue that educational numbers generated by ILSAs, in part, now help to construct Canadian schooling as a national system. While participation in ILSAs is a provincial decision and has created direct relationships between sub-national entities and international organisations, illustrating what Lingard and Lewis (2017) describe as new spatialities of education governance, participation in ILSAs also contributes to a national imaginary of Canadian education.

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