1. Create international tables which claim to be able to compare a country's level or standard of education.
2. Make it hard for people to find out how the samples who are tested are selected. Rely on the media to ignore it anyway.
3. Produce league tables which do not make instantly clear that the differences between placings on the table are sometimes tiny. Rely on the media to ignore this.
4. Ignore the fact that a tiny sample taking the test cannot and do not represent a whole country's educational 'standard. Rely on the media to do the ignoring.
5. Use the tables as a means by which to bully state education on the matter of 'competitiveness', which is a weasel way of drawing a whole country into the matter of how big business competes with other big business, and indeed that this global warfare is less and less about countries and more and more about global corporation. Even so, 'competitiveness' is useful for politicians peddling 'national' solutions. Rely on the media to peddle this.
6. Apply 'competitiveness' to education, which means sidelining educational ideas about learning through cooperation, invention, investigation, interpretation. Rely on the media to peddle this.
7. Do all you can to create a GCSE curriculum that is massively loaded with facts ('knowledge').
8. Do all you can to use this as the determinant for what the whole curriculum from Reception (4 year olds) upwards must 'work towards'. In other words Reception class should be full of GCSE apprentices.
9. Put all children from the time they enter the state system on to tables sorted by 'ability' or 'achievement' or 'attainment'.
10. Call the tables 'blue' and 'green' and 'yellow'. Or 'sparrows' and 'rabbits'. Or both.
11. Bring back behaviour modification charts to deal with the 4 year old kids who won't sit down.
