Meeting of the Parliament 15 May 2019
Four years ago, like Liz Smith, I was a member of this Parliament’s Education and Culture Committee. Since then, the committee has gained in skills what, in remit at least, it appears to have lost in culture. However, what remains unchanged is the controversy and confusion that surrounds the SNP Government’s national standardised assessments. Given their origins in the Education (Scotland) Act 2016, I do not find that at all surprising. Bounced by the First Minister’s announcement that education was to be her number 1 priority and that the attainment gap would be closed “completely”, the then Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills, Angela Constance, had to come up with a cunning plan.
In response, a national improvement framework was put on a statutory footing, paving the way for the reintroduction of national standardised tests. That was news to gladden the heart of Michael Forsyth, perhaps, but certainly not what teachers, parents and other stakeholders had been insisting to the Education and Skills Committee was required to address gaps in attainment.
To make matters worse, the committee was given no detail about the framework or the tests. It was a classic pig in a poke, and the story kept changing. Faced with compelling evidence that teachers already had a wealth of information on which to base assessments and tailor learning for pupils, SNP ministers claimed that it was no good because it was not standardised. When it was suggested that national standardisation would inevitably lead to league tables, ministers retorted that data would not be available at school or local authority level, begging the question: what is the point?
No one disputes the importance of tackling attainment, but, as Children in Scotland observed at the time,
“the educational inequalities that stem from socio-economic disadvantage are complex and multifaceted”.
Children in Scotland accused ministers of reducing
“a complex set of issues ... to an easily identifiable slogan with the hope that these issues will be amenable to equally short-term solutions”.
Such a damning conclusion echoed earlier criticism from Keir Bloomer, who labelled the Government’s approach
“pious thinking masquerading as policy making”—[Official Report, Education and Culture Committee, 9 June 2015; c 20.]
Roll forward four years and, as I say, the confusion surrounding—and at the heart of—the SNP Government’s approach to national standardised testing appears only to have deepened. Parliament has, of course, voted to halt the testing of P1 pupils. Despite that, Mr Swinney has simply ignored the will of Parliament, and 11,500 P1 tests have taken place in schools across Scotland in this academic year.
As for the justification for the tests, the story keeps changing and history keeps being rewritten. In their desperation to retrofit a case for national standardised testing, ministers have even gone so far as to shamefully misrepresent the views of international educational experts. It was claimed that Dylan Wiliam, professor of educational assessment at University College London, and Professor Popham of the University of California, Los Angeles, were supporters of regimes like the SNP’s testing proposals. Professor Wiliam called that a “perverse misrepresentation” of his work, while Professor Popham insisted that it was “flat-out incorrect”. In attempting a clumsy apology, the First Minister made matters worse by questioning Professor Wiliam's understanding of formative assessment.
After all the ducking and diving, where has that left us? As Iain Gray observed—rightly, in my view—certainly no nearer to closing gaps in attainment, far less closing them completely. As The Times Educational Supplement concluded earlier this year,
“Scotland does not have a standardised testing regime, it just has a badly named national literacy and numeracy test that is costing millions.”
Whatever the tests now are, they do not command the confidence of teachers, parents, children or academic experts, and they should be dropped. I support the motion.
16:23