Meeting of the Parliament 19 September 2018
I will not do so at the moment, if the member does not mind.
In my teacher training years, I remember exactly the same debate taking place among primary teachers. Therefore, in refining my thoughts prior to leading this debate, I looked carefully at the primary 1 tests, at the curriculum for excellence in the early years, and at what Scotland has done in the past. I have to say that the curriculum for excellence in the early years is relatively free of the controversy that has bedevilled the later stages, which was laid bare at the Education and Skills Committee this morning.
I spoke to a lot of people who have done the Froebel training, to find out whether there are concerns that the absence of formal testing means that too many children with problems are not identified. Only a few said yes, that was possible; the majority said that their specialist training enabled them to pick up problems more quickly.
A former teacher, who had been head of an infant department, told me that the best way to decide the answer to the whole question of whether to test in P1 is to look at the historical trends in standards in the middle and final primary years, because if the Froebel system had not been delivering, basic standards in literacy and numeracy in P4 and P7 would have suffered. They did not suffer. Indeed, Scotland had a really strong set of results—and that was irrespective of social background.
At this stage in today’s debate, it is important to recognise that current concerns about the standardised tests are largely concentrated on the primary 1 age group. Some critics, with whom I profoundly disagree, believe that the other standardised tests are wrong, but it is primary 1 on which the focus has fallen. We should be asking ourselves why that is.