Meeting of the Parliament 19 September 2018
The survey is certainly not a diagnostic learning tool, and it was never claimed to be. It is a summative survey tool. Later on, I will go into a little detail on exactly that point.
James Maxton once said of politics:
“If you can’t ride two horses at once, you shouldn’t be in the circus.”
Mr Swinney has failed to ride the two horses of individual diagnostics and national standardised testing at once. That has resulted in the current mess and in some farcical moments, such as Mr Swinney’s press release that told us that the tests were not tests and that we should stop calling them tests being issued on the same day that his department released an evaluation that called them tests. He also told parents who asked whether the tests were compulsory that they are not compulsory, but that the parents have no right to refuse to allow their child to take them. That is a riddle and not an answer. There was also yesterday’s desperate measure of Scottish Government officials putting MSPs and journalists through a literacy and numeracy test for five-year-olds, as if that would prove anything.
Mr Swinney has clearly told the Parliament that the tests are
“diagnostic assessments to support learning and teaching. Data from them will not be published or used for accountability”.—[Official Report, 5 September 2018; c 21.]
However, the First Minister has said something different. She said:
“As a result of the introduction of standardised assessment and the new way in which we are monitoring performance, instead of the previous Scottish survey of literacy and numeracy data, we will now have data on every pupil in the country, which will allow us to determine progress in reducing the attainment gap.”—[Official Report, 21 June 2018; c 10.]
The First Minister thinks that those are statistically valid results to monitor progress nationally, whereas the Deputy First Minister swears to us that they are not.
The truth is that the Government has managed to introduce assessments that feel like high-stakes tests to teachers and pupils, but do not produce statistically valid comparative measurements, and diagnostic tests that teachers tell us that they do not trust to diagnose and which have not replaced the assessments that they used previously. The Deputy First Minister says that they are not summative assessments against benchmarks with a pass or fail, but yesterday we were shown the teacher sheet for each pupil, which is a list of curriculum for excellence benchmarks with a tick or a cross against each one according to whether it was passed or failed. The pupil is then placed against a national norm. We were shown results being collated at class, school and local authority levels. That looks like summative norm-referenced testing to me.
To be honest, what I think of the assessments is not important; what matters is what teachers think of them, and their views are very clear, not least from the Educational Institute of Scotland.