The Canary Died on Tuesday

It’s been an utterly desperate week for those of us concerned about reading in the UK.

The Welsh Government’s statement on this week’s PISA results was that they “reinforce what we knew already” and that “there will be no knee-jerk response”. Which doesn’t, you know, inspire a great amount of confidence that an awful crisis is about to be resolved. We already knew we were terrible, but we still won’t be doing anything about it is a heck of a line to take.

Further to the north, Scotland’s Education Secretary found “real strengths in Scottish education” but declined to actually do anything as mundane as identifying any of them.

Two UK governments, two statements, and between them not one sentence that could reassure a parent that their schooling systems were going to stop epically sucking at teaching reading in anything like the near future.

In case you’ve no idea what those comments were responding to, you should probably know that PISA came out this week. And if you’ve even a passing interest in education in the UK, you’ll have seen the league table. England’s results finally clawed its way back into the international top ten, whereas Scotland and Wales are, as ever, “falling behind”.

Here are the headlines:

Wales. Girls 472, boys 446. The girls’ score hasn’t moved since 2015 while the boys’ score has dropped off a cliff.

Scotland. Girls 503, boys 473. Girls no different from 2018 or 2022 whereas boys have significantly dropped below where they were in 2009, 2012, 2018 and 2022.

England. Girls 503, boys 492. Boys flat since 2015 while girls are down from 515 in 2018.

All very depressing, of course. But the key message I take from all of this is not that, yet again, boys are falling behind. It’s that boys are the canary for a system that’s crashing and burning. I believe that the failure of boys readng in the UK is the smoke alarm going off for a wider disaster. And yet Cardiff and Edinburgh have responded by taking the battery out and saying the house “has real strengths.”

The warning signs are all there if people want to consider them…

In 2006, Chiu and McBride-Chang took the PISA data of 199,097 fifteen-year-olds across 43 countries and found that eighty-eight percent of what makes a poor reader is the system the kid is sitting inside. And boys were “at least 50% more likely than girls to be poor readers.” Then, in 2012, Legewie and DiPrete found that boys “are more sensitive than girls” to the quality of the school around them. Basically, put a boy in a school with a strong academic culture and he rises faster than the girl next to him. But put him in a failing one and he drops like a stone.

Boys’ performance is inextricably linked to the quality of the room.

Read those two studies and then think about the UK’s three sets of PISA numbers again. Girls flat. Boys falling.

That is not what “boys have a reading problem” looks like. This what a school system getting significantly worse looks like, but captured at the point where it’s dropping the kids who’re most sensitive to that failure – the boys - but hasn’t quite yet dropped the girls who are a little more resilient to that weakness.

Welsh education gets its own kicking this week (mostly because that’s where most of my family lives) as their government’s defence to all this was to highlight its “comparative effectiveness in supporting the most disadvantaged learners”. Which sounds lovely and progressive, doesn’t it?

Well, it’s worth taking a second to highlight what a weaselly-worded and morally bankrupt position that actually is.

Because, sure, the Welsh reading gap between richest and poorest is 50 points. And in England it is 66. Which might, for a moment look like cause for celebration. However, the Welsh have only managed to create a smaller gap because their results are so desperately poor across the board. Nearly a third of Welsh fifteen-year-olds score below Level 2 (which is the OECD’s line for being remotely competent at reading in a way that will help you in life).

So, the way the Welsh have “closed the attainment gap” is by having fewer kids at the top to measure it against. The school system in Wales has made ever child’s life measurably worse, regardless of their economic status, and then took a victory lap.

The defence of the Scottish government, though, is actually more irritating because Scotland knew better. They paid for a study that showed exactly how boys reading could be developed (that’s the research in Clackmannanshire, which I focused on a fortnight ago). But then they built a ridiculous curriculum around something else entirely. And the spectacular success of that can be seen in, this week, Glasgow City Council announcing it’s hiring primary teachers to run phonics classes for secondary pupils because kids are arriving at eleven with reading ages of “five or six-years-old”. Bouquets and applause all around, please.

Keir Bloomer, who chairs Scotland’s Commission on School Reform, called Tuesday “the poorest set of results that Scotland has achieved” since PISA began. And when he was asked whether Scotland was letting its children down, he said “yes”. That was the only honest thing a person in any UK government has said all week.

But England shouldn’t get too smug either. Back in 2023 the OECD looked across all its member countries and reported that the gender gaps in reading “closed because the performance of girls declined, rather than because the performance of boys improved” and England this week is the textbook case. Its attainment gap “narrowed” from 23 to 11. But English boys went nowhere.

We’re not fixing the boys in England, we’re just starting to lose the girls.

Look, I’m not angry about Tuesday just because the boys’ numbers are bad. They’ve been bad everywhere in the world for as long as anyone’s been measuring them. It’s not news and I have only so much rage to go around. A 2024 IEA-UNESCO report put girls ahead of boys in 51 of 57 countries. What I’m angry about, though, is that all the research shows that these terrible boys’ numbers are an early warning about a system-wide collapse. And no-one seems to care.

The girls are going to be next. That’s what a canary is for.

Sources

Ming Ming Chiu and Catherine McBride-Chang, ‘Gender, Context, and Reading: A Comparison of Students in 43 Countries’, Scientific Studies of Reading, 10.4 (2006), 331–62.

Joscha Legewie and Thomas A. DiPrete, ‘School Context and the Gender Gap in Educational Achievement’, American Sociological Review, 77.3 (2012), 463–85.

Michael Becker and Nele McElvany, ‘The Interplay of Gender and Social Background: A Longitudinal Study of Interaction Effects in Reading Attitudes and Behaviour’, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 88.4 (2018), 529–49.

Doris R. Entwisle, Karl L. Alexander and Linda S. Olson, ‘Early Schooling: The Handicap of Being Poor and Male’, Sociology of Education, 80.2 (2007), 114–38.

OECD, PISA 2022 Results (Volume I): The State of Learning and Equity in Education (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2023).

Matthias Eck, Juliane Hencke, Alec Kennedy, Sabine Meinck and Justine Sass, Why Boys May Need More Support in Building Their Reading Motivation, Confidence, and Engagement, IEA Compass: Briefs in Education, 25 (Amsterdam: IEA, 2024).

Rhona Johnston and Joyce Watson, The Effects of Synthetic Phonics Teaching on Reading and Spelling Attainment: A Seven Year Longitudinal Study (Edinburgh: Scottish Executive Education Department, 2005).

Department for Education, PISA 2025: National Report for England (September 2026); Welsh Government, PISA 2025: National Report for Wales (September 2026); Scottish Government, PISA 2025: National Report for Scotland(September 2026).

Michael Dauncey, ‘How did Wales perform in PISA 2025?’, Senedd Research, 8 September 2026; BBC News, 8–9 September 2026 (Branwen Jeffreys; ‘Primary teachers hired to teach Glasgow secondary pupils to read’); Keir Bloomer and Mairi McAllan as reported by BBC Scotland and the Scottish Daily Express, 9 September 2026.