How to massage the media to send out a message to make people believe that 'Literacy' standards in England are improving:

 Guardian:

'Despite the improvement in ranking, England’s score remained virtually unchanged since the last round of assessments in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls), which took place in 2016, with its average actually dropping marginally...'

People reading headlines on how England is doing in 'Literacy' might have got the impression that it's going great. In fact, the scores have stayed the same but England's rank in the international table has gone up. Like a football team that can play the same but go up the table.

So there's been a huge bit of highly successful media massage in order to claim that England's kids are doing better at literacy than ever before.

In a word, this is rubbish. And amazingly, apart from this little para halfway through a Guardian article, no one's noticed.