Meeting of the Parliament 25 October 2018
Johann Lamont frequently accuses me of impugning people’s motives. Maybe I have to look at how I communicate about some of these issues. I do not impugn the motives of teachers who come to me and say that they do not like the tests. Equally, I do not impugn the motives of teachers who come to me and say that the tests are essential. Those are points of view that I have heard, and Johann Lamont will have heard them, too. If she has not, I do not think that she is listening to all sides of the debate. All of the evidence that has been marshalled shows that those are competing points of view.
If I have impugned anyone’s motives, it is those of the Conservatives, because they have behaved, politically, in an utterly inconsistent fashion on this issue. I own up to impugning the Conservatives’ motives in this debate, but nobody else’s. I might have a different perspective on the debate, which is why I am commissioning an independent review of the process.
To answer the second part of Johann Lamont’s question, I made it expressly clear in my statement that standardised assessments form part of individual teachers’ overall judgments about whether young people are reaching the levels in curriculum for excellence. That is the purpose of standardised assessments.
The First Minister’s point on 21 June is that the standardised assessments enable us to reflect consistency, or support the achievement of consistency, in assessment across the country, which is not possible in the compartmentalised assessments that are undertaken in each local authority area.