Hansard

None of my amendments specifies the content of the framework or the detail of the assessment. That is deliberate. It would be inappropriate to specify the exact contents in primary legislation. The framework will evolve to reflect emerging trends in our system and support informed decision making at all levels. It is important that we allow for that and do not create legislation that unnecessarily restricts flexibility and innovation. At the heart of our amendments is our ambition to create an approach to improvement that everyone agrees is proportionate, meaningful, robust, consistent and—to be frank—useful to achieving our priority purposes of closing the attainment gap while raising standards for all. We can agree on a number of principles on which to anchor our approach to measuring children’s progress. In line with international best practice, we will have a full range of evidence under one comprehensive framework, which will tell us how our education system is improving and where further action is needed. Teacher judgment will form the bedrock of the assessment process for children’s progress on curriculum for excellence levels, as it does now. However, for the first time, teachers will have access to consistent national standardised assessment data for individual children that is designed specifically to support curriculum for excellence, which will help to inform their judgment about children’s progress in literacy and numeracy. Teachers will be able to use the standardised assessment during the school year to help inform their judgments about and action to support individual children. Assessment must be used in a way that informs and elicits timely action to improve outcomes for children. We will undertake work to bring about greater clarity and consistency on standards within curriculum levels and the other pieces of assessment evidence that teachers can collect to inform their professional judgment. We will collect and publish a range of data that will provide consistent, robust and transparent information to support improvement. Nationally and locally, we will collect and publish teacher judgment information on the achievement of curriculum for excellence levels, initially for literacy and numeracy, at key points in primary school and early secondary school. Parents and the public will be able to access the teacher judgment information consistently across schools and local authorities, through such portals as the parentzone Scotland website. Schools will be able to use standardised assessment data and teachers’ judgment about the progress of individual children to inform discussions with parents about children’s progress and achievements. That key part of our reports will give parents more consistent and specific information about their children’s progress and learning and will help to signal to parents where they can help and support their children. Local authorities will also want to know how schools in their areas are doing and whether and how they have improved attainment, not least to help to fulfil authorities’ new statutory planning and reporting duties. I, as cabinet secretary, will want to know how we are doing at a national level in order to close the attainment gap and to identify where we are making progress and where we might have more to do to help to meet the new duties that are being placed on ministers. It is clear that assessment is just one part of the framework; that point has been somewhat overlooked during much of the recent debate on the framework. At the same time, it is widely accepted that assessment tools can play an important role in learning, which is why teachers throughout Scotland already use them. During the debate, the realisation has emerged that, while many are already using some form of standardised assessment, there is still a range of tools out there that assess different things in different ways. We simply cannot construct a national picture of how our children are doing from the information that local authorities already gather. It is disappointing that Liam McArthur’s amendment 106A does not recognise the need for—or, importantly, the benefits that will result from—a shift to a national standardised assessment. To rule out an approach that will provide us with consistent and meaningful data at all levels seems to be short sighted, and I do not support his amendment. When we design the assessment, we will be sure to learn from the experience of other countries. We are committed to considering how our whole education system compares with the experiences and efforts of other countries around the world—hence the inclusion of a new requirement in proposed new section 3G(2) of the 2000 act that all annual reports that are produced by the Scottish ministers should take account of relevant international benchmarking data. Suggesting that those considerations should be restricted to the incomplete list of surveys that are set out in Mark Griffin’s amendment 107E—some of which are relevant, while others, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s teaching and learning international survey, are less so—makes no sense. I am confident that the finalised framework, which will be published early in the new year, will carry broad support. We have engaged with and involved those who have an interest in that significant development in our education system, and we have worked hard to assuage concerns while listening to views on developing the framework’s content. Taken together, the amendments in my name, supplemented by Mark Griffin’s amendment 104G and Mary Scanlon’s amendment 159, will provide us with strong foundations for delivering sustained improvement across our education system in the years to come, and will—importantly—enable us to monitor improvement and progress to close the attainment gap. I encourage the committee to support those amendments. I move amendment 104.