The OECD test for schools, to be launched on Wednesday in Washington DC, will allow schools or local authorities to assess themselves against the standards of Pisa tests – the programme for International Student Assessment.

Schools will be able to see how their pupils compare with the highest performing school systems, such as Finland, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Should these tests be offered to the UK, which this BBC article suggests they will be, I am not sure which schools will be asking for them. I can only presume it would be academically selective schools who feel it would give them another means of highlighting to parents how good they are. Students in this country are already assessed and tested more than most students around the world and I do hope that nobody wants the PISA style tests to be widely adopted in the UK.

The article quotes Beth Davies at the recent National Union of Teachers conference and I can see where she is coming from.

At this weekend’s conference, the union’s president Beth Davies, told teachers: “I don’t know about you but I am thoroughly sick of hearing about Pisa.”

She said that comparing test results with countries such as Finland failed to recognise the underlying differences in their education systems.

At Polam Hall we have boarding pupils from the Far East, including Hong Kong and mainland China. There is no doubt that their general level of maths ability is very good and I am sure the same is true of many Chinese students across the UK. But why do so many of these students travel to the UK for a British education either at school or at university?

Learning English in an immersive fashion is certainly a key factor, however there are other reasons too. A lot of university courses in the UK now involve significant proportions of time spent on problem based learning, as do GCSE and A level courses. The traditional method of education in China and Hong Kong is very didactic, with large classes of students making notes whilst being lectured.

I was lucky enough to visit a number of schools in Beijing and Shanghai in March 2012 and the classrooms we were walked past by our guides were tightly packed with rows of desks, the only free space was at the front for the teacher to walk up and down his or her whiteboard.

In one school a poster on the wall suggested that silence was a virtue and it was not aimed at corridor behaviour, but at classroom behaviour.

In the UK we encourage students to participate in highly interactive lessons, to engage in debate, to learn to think for themselves so that by the time they get to university they will be independent learners, capable of tackling problem based learning.

At Polam Hall we start this process in our Junior School, with a skills based creative curriculum and one morning a week spent working in mixed year groups on challenging projects. In the senior school team building exercises are incorporated into the curriculum and PLTS (Personal Learning and Thinking Skills) are embedded in lessons.

Some of the staff we met in China were engaged in setting up exchange programmes with schools in the UK as there is a keen desire in these schools to learn about UK educational methods, so that they can be incorporated into curricula in China on the return of staff and students. A lot of money is being spent on such programmes and whilst such schools are producing excellent students under their own systems they clearly realise the value of learning about other educational cultures.

The proportion of non-British pupils at Independent School Council schools in 2012 was up 5.8% compared to 2011 at 26,376. In Independent School Council schools, there are currently 26,376 non – British pupils whose parents live overseas. This highlights the attraction of an education at an ISC school to a global market and reflects the PISA findings from the OECD which rank UK independent schools as among the best in the world.37.0% of non-British pupils with parents living overseas come from Hong Kong and China. The next highest share from a single country comes from Germany (8.9%). Europe, as a whole, accounts for 34.3% of all non-British pupils with parents living overseas.

I haven’t seen any Pisa tests ever, and I am not sure I particularly want to, but I would not be joining any queue to introduce the tests at Polam Hall as I do not see the point in passing judgement on students by means of a test that was not set up to specifically assess teaching and learning under the UK system. GCSEs and A levels may have their flaws, the UK system is not perfect, but the number of international students moving to the UK to study here at schools and universities suggests quite clearly that the UK education system is still highly respected and valued around the world.

Sean Coughlan, BBC News education correspondent