OECD education report: this is Labour's legacy writ large Poor Tristram Hunt. Having already had to take a knock recently from his former Cambridge Footlights pal Robert Webb, who described how "Tris wasn't reliably funny," the shadow education secretary's comments that the latest OECD PISA results of 15-year-old English pupils are somehow due to this Government's education reforms have been slapped down by the OECD as being equally unreliable. When asked at a press conference yesterday, "Is it too early to judge the reforms?," the Deputy Director of the OECD Andreas Schleicher responded: "You could not possibly judge them on these results. You are moving from idea to implementation: 2015 would be the earliest. That [time span] is the same for most education policies. You surely could not expect any reforms to take effect for 2012, when these reforms were just being implemented. So who should we judge for the fact that in Maths, England is now ranked 25th, compared to 27th in 2009, in reading we are now ranked 23rd, compared to 25th in 2009, and in Science England is now ranked 18th, compared to 16th in 2009? Essentially results have stagnated since 2009, when we slipped from being 8th for Maths, 7th for reading and 4th for science in 2000, down to 28th for maths, 25th for reading and 16th for science. Given that the pupils taking the 2012 tests had already started their GCSE courses under the previous government, having spent eight years already being educated under Labour, it's not difficult to understand Andreas Schleicher's own powerful critique of Tristram's judgment. The OECD has constantly remained a thorn in the side of Labour's own narrative on education. For years we had to believe - who could be allowed to disagree? - that improved GCSE results were a benchmark of improved standards, as results shot up from 57 per cent of pupils gaining five good GCSEs in 2000 to 69 per cent in 2010. Let's not have any of this nonsense about dumbing down and it being easier. It's not true," said Ed Balls on GCSE results day 2009. The concerns of academics such as Peter Tymms and Robert Coe that GCSEs were now an entire grade easier than a decade before were brushed aside for the sake of perceived progress. Since 2010, however, if we believed Labour's fallacy, results have for the first time in over a decade, "declined" - in 2013, 68.1 per cent of pupils gained five good GCSEs, compared with 69.8 per cent in 2010. Yet today's PISA results reveal that pupils" maths scores have risen from 493 to 495, while English scores have risen from 495 to 500. None of this adds up, but at least for the first time in a decade, we can perhaps be freed from the tyranny of grade inflation. If there is one lesson to learn from these PISA results, it is that we urgently need GCSE reform - so that our exams do not pay lip-service to politicians' electoral hopes, but instead are transformed to ensure pupil achievement can be accurately measured on an international scale. Chris Skidmore is Conservative MP for Kingswood and a member of the Education Select Committee