Tests have shown that IQ levels are rising. But as Britain’s pupils sit exams, we ask: Are children really brighter today?

If there’s one thing more irritating than a smarty pants pupil who thinks they’re cleverer than you, it’s the discovery that the little darling might be absolutely right. Well, get ready for some bad news. Many academics believe that the current generation of pupils is the cleverest in history. It’s part of a phenomenon known as “the Flynn effect” – a year-on-year rise in IQ scores that poses intriguing questions about the meaning of intelligence, as well as the future of education in the developed world.

In Britain, where the yearly tearing open of the results envelope invariably precipitates grumblings about dumbing down and grade inflation, the idea that children are getting smarter is bound to have many teachers choking on their tea.

Despite national test scores that have marched inexorably upwards since they began in 1995, critics note that our results in international comparisons have wavered or declined since the mid-Nineties. Back in 2006, a London University study even claimed that the average Year 7 pupil was more than two years behind their equivalent from the previous decade. So what’s the truth behind these confusing, and often contradictory, figures?

A good starting point are the findings of Jim Flynn, Professor of Political Studies at Otago University in New Zealand, and author of What is Intelligence? In the Eighties, Professor Flynn embarked on IQ research to disprove theories alleging that black Americans were inferior to their white counterparts. But his findings were to have implications beyond US racial politics.

In a nutshell, he discovered a phenomenon that had been sitting right under his colleagues’ noses for decades, but which they’d failed to notice. Since the inception of intelligence testing in the early 20th century, average IQs have risen by about half a point each year in the developed world. Professor Flynn realised that, not only were today’s test takers scoring higher than ever (the British alone gained more than 27 IQ points between 1945 and 1992), but that our ancestors were getting grades that would have marked them out as mentally impaired by present standards. Did this mean that modern schooling was producing ever more accomplished children? Or something else entirely?

As you’d expect, academics haven’t been slow to produce hypotheses. Some theories, like natural selection and nutrition, have been shelved or disputed; the former because rising IQs are considered too rapid to be explained purely in terms of breeding, the latter because although human beings have undeniably grown in height and head size over the past century, Professor Flynn believes that IQ scores have improved, even where nutrition hasn’t.

Read more in this week's TES Magazine, out Friday May 16