The Deputy First Minister criticised the educational model pursued under Michael Gove in England
Published 19th Oct 2026, 06:00 BST
English pupils performed better than those in Scotland in an international school survey largely because of a "shallow" focus on rote learning, the Deputy First Minister has suggested.
Jenny Gilruth said a "large part" of the difference was down to the approach taken to the curriculum by Michael Gove when he was the UK education secretary under David Cameron.
She said the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) may now be moving away from the "crude, narrow measurement that Mr Gove focused on".
Ms Gilruth made the comments during a fringe meeting held by the EIS, Scotland's largest teaching union, at the SNP conference in Aberdeen.
Andrea Bradley, the general secretary of the EIS, called for a "better perspective" on Pisa, adding: "The idea that one set of Pisa scores, which is basically a sampling of a group of teenagers and how they are doing in literacy, numeracy and science, is not an indicator of how well an education system is performing.
"The OECD [Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development] has done a very, very good job of making the world believe that that is a very good measure of how systems are performing. It's a really good marketing job that they've done on that."
Pisa is published every three years and measures the performance of more than 760,000 15-year-olds from 91 countries.
The most recent results put English pupils ahead of their counterparts in Scotland in terms of standards in reading, maths and science. It found the performance of Scotland’s teenagers in maths and reading declined slightly between 2022 and 2025.
READ MORE: 'Wake up call': PISA figures show Scots pupils a year behind their English peers
In September, Lord Gove offered to work with SNP Education Secretary Màiri McAllan and Public Service Reform Secretary Ivan McKee on changes to Scotland’s schools.
He accused SNP ministers of having “pursued ideological fads that are not rooted in what works”, and contrasted this with England, where he said the school curriculum is “more ambitious, teaching more knowledge”.
Speaking during the fringe meeting, Ms Bradley warned against going down a “Govean dark alley, where the educational experience shrinks so that learning in the areas that make us the creative beings that we are is rubbished, and learning is restricted instead to areas where performance is considered to be easily measurable”.
She said: “We want deep learning rather than cheap learning.”
Ms Gilruth said: “I think Mairi was actually invited to meet with Michael Gove and to learn from his great learning, and she was able to resist his advances.”
She said Lord Gove’s approach was not “enthusiastically met in all corners of England”.
“He might have been able to improve their Pisa scores,” she said. “Are Pisa scores the only measure we look at? That's the question. I don't think that that is credible.”
She said the way in which the OECD measures Pisa is changing, adding: “We’re now starting to see them evolve in terms of the types of skills that they look at, so that crude, narrow measurement that Mr Gove focused on in England and Wales - the rote learning, the shallow learning that was applied in England and Wales might have helped them with their Pisa scores, but what if, in the future, Pisa doesn't measure these things?
“What if Pisa moves, and we came back to the Govean model? I don't really see how that helps us moving forward in terms of improving the quality of learning that's happening in our schools.”
Ms Gilruth said a “large part” of the difference in results was the approach taken by Mr Gove to the curriculum in England.
She added: “If you read what Gove has written about it, he's pretty honest about essentially driving changes in their system that allowed them to improve their Pisa scores that were focused on rote learning and things that we've moved really away from in recent years under CfE [Curriculum for Excellence] in Scotland.”
Ms McAllan previously said reforms are under way to improve Scotland’s curriculum.
She said: “They are about clarifying the role of knowledge in our curriculum and the progression a young person ought to make through the curriculum.
“I believe it is necessary, but equally I will not do it to the exclusion of everything else that makes our education system good for our young people, including those other curricular areas like problem solving, moral education, creative expression.”
The Scottish Conservatives have warned Scotland’s education system is “going backwards”.
Speaking in September, the party’s leader Russell Findlay said: “The SNP are fully responsible for education in Scotland and only have themselves to blame for lagging so far behind England.”