Meeting of the Parliament 19 September 2018
Thank you, Mr Stevenson. Yes, I am aware of that. The same debate is happening in England, Wales and many other places—it is not unique to Scotland.
I would like to share a few thoughts from a primary teacher who wrote to me earlier this week. She told me that she was worried about this debate on primary 1 tests, and about the fact that some politicians may be misrepresenting our position. An experienced teacher of primary 1 and primary 2, she asked me to look at the debate from the point of view of the best interests of the child. She said:
“There have been some good questions in the new tests but there are others which have undoubtedly created problems and which, as a result, have been the catalyst for the current complaints. In some of the questions the language used is not making use of the phonetic alphabet with which children are familiar and they are using names which were very hard to read. Some questions are too long, taking up too much time, and there is overemphasis on data handling within each assessment, for which I can’t really understand the purpose.”
She went on to say that that had led to much discussion in her staff room, ending up with many teachers feeling that there had been insufficient training about how many teachers would be able to participate in the tests and how to interpret them, and that there was too much pressure to complete the assessments in a hurry, which I do not think was the Scottish Government’s intention. All that seemed to be very time consuming and not altogether clear on how teachers will use the tests to inform their teaching, which is very important.