International competition is sprouting everywhere with both very traditional and novel activities as its focus. The World Cup is looming over the horizon and we have just survived the mounting absurdities of the Eurovision Song Contest. What else? Well, one of the more intriguing fields of human endeavour stepping into the global competitive spotlight is education and you might have noticed a bit of a kerfuffle about this a couple of months or so ago.

The latest set of scholastic league tables put China ( or more specifically Shanghai) in the number one spot with other parts of the far east such as Singapore, Korea and Japan in, or close to, other top ranked places. The relatively 'poor' performance of the UK countries inevitably made the reporting of the exercise into something of a political football. It was intriguing, then, to have the opportunity to discuss the whole issue with a small group of Chinese teachers and educationalists a week or so ago. What was particularly interesting was the degree of scepticism they seemed to have about the Shanghai performance in particular.

Just to give the whole thing a bit of context [ warning - you are now entering an acronym-rich zone]. These international education assessments come courtesy of a programme called PISA ( the Programme for International Student Assessment) which is directed by OECD ( the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). There are other projects with similar aims of providing meaningful international comparisons such as TIMSS ( Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) and PIRLS ( Progress in International Reading Literacy Study). [ YWW - that is, you were warned]

The aim of PISA is to provide a common assessment of 15 year olds across many countries - 44 in total - and involving over half a million young people in the most recent case. The assessment looks in particular at achievement in maths, reading and science and the 2012 exercise ( which reported at the end of 2013) has a particular focus on maths.

As mentioned, the far east seem to score particularly well in the maths tests and the UK was seen as languishing rather shamefully some twenty odd places down the table. As we have all been to school, and many of us are, indeed, parents, we are all profoundly qualified in education matters ((just as travelling by plane perfectly equips us to fly one) and much heat ensued.

A junior education minister was despatched to China to see for herself the fruits of the Chinese approach and came back with a message that approximated to 'I have seen the future- and it all adds up' and a group of Chinese maths teachers ( a Shanghai summation ?) are to come back to the UK to share their expertise.

The view from within China on all of this was worth hearing. The Chinese teachers in Birmingham were here to see what they themselves might learn from aspects of our approach to education matters generally and to that end visited a school and one of our university education departments. There they were taken through an overview of the tangle of policy development that teachers and pupils have contended with for the past couple of decades - a presentation that concluded with these latest PISA tables.

Having patiently been navigated through the bewilderness of UK policy, our Chinese friends perked up at this point. The burden of their assessment seemed to be that education experts elsewhere in China are themselves more than a little intrigued by the Shanghai performance. Although they were far too diplomatic to say so directly - playing away from home as it were - it was difficult to avoid an impression that felt that the of these results might need a further degree of close scrutiny. The plot thickens.

What was just as interesting was the extent to which the focus of this group of teachers was less on the slightly arid measurement of performance and productivity that the PISA approach rests on and much more on the wider development of the child. Their school is actually attached to one of Beijing's leading teacher training institutions; their interest in their school visit here was in the experience of children working together in groups in contrast to the typically more formal set up in Chinese classes.

They actually had a very particular desire to get some real idea of how Eton College (and presumably the wider private sector here)is set up; in how good it really is and is how it delivers the results that it does for pupils and parents.

The ultimate global competition is of course the economic one. This brief visit underlined the extent to which China also sees education as the vital component is winning that game - but suggested they may actually be beginning to approach it from a very different perspective that we do here in the UK.