A new contractor has been brought on board to deliver Scotland’s standardised national assessments in literacy and numeracy, with the cost to the taxpayer expected to be £17 million over five years.
The Scottish government is planning to officially launch “phase two” of its standardised testing regime in August with the creation of a “shared platform” for Scottish National Standardised Assessments (SNSAs) and the Gaelic version of the tests, Measaidhean Coitcheann Nàiseanta airson Foghlam tron Ghàidhlig (MCNG).
When the government first went out to tender for a contractor for SNSAs in 2016, it put the cost of the assessments at £10 million over five years, with the Australian Council for Educational Research, through ACER UK, taken on to fulfil the contract.
But now ACER UK and new contractor AlphaPlus, which was taken on in May last year, are both being employed to work on the assessments.
The Scottish government says the contracts are running in tandem so that ACER UK can deliver the tests up to the end of the current school year and the new contractor, AlphaPlus, can have time to develop “appropriate assessments and an assessment platform in time for August 2022”.
AlphaPlus is an education service business based in Manchester that specialises in “standards, assessment and certification”. It worked with the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) on the 2020 “alternative certification model” that replaced national exams when they were cancelled because of the pandemic.
The moderation of results carried out by the SQA in 2020 eventually resulted in students taking to the streets in protest at the grades they received and the Scottish government being forced to revert to teacher judgements.
An SQA report, National Qualifications 2020 Awarding - Methodology Report, says AlphaPlus provided “expertise in educational assessment and statistics” and added: “Their independent experts provided assurance on SQA’s approach to moderation at each step in the process.”
Now the body has won the £17 million contract to deliver standardised assessments, but the government disputes the apparent £7 million cost increase.
It says that in 2016, when the contract for delivering the tests was £10 million over five years, it was “not possible to make an accurate cost estimate” and that the price tag attached to the tender was “a guide price for potential bidders”.
The government also says that the bill is bigger because the new contractor will be responsible for delivering both the English language SNSAs and the Gaelic version of the tests, MCNG.
A letter from education secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville to the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee, published on the committee web pages, acknowledges that “phase 2 of the MCNG was originally expected to launch from January 2022” but says more time is needed “to optimise the assessments for the MCNG (and SNSAs thereafter) and ensure they meet the needs of education staff, children and young people”.
According to Ms Somerville, trialling of the MCNG will begin “in the summer term” before the tests are launched “formally alongside the SNSA in August 2022”.
The increasing cost of literacy and numeracy testing in Scotland - as well as the prospect of a change in provider - is bound to cause concern among teachers and school leaders.
The educational value of the tests is already disputed, and teachers and heads will be nervous about any teething problems the change in contractor might lead to come August - especially as the tests are sat by P1 pupils.
In the early days of the SNSAs, there were complaints about the appropriateness of some of the questions pupils faced, with a passage on hummingbirds that asked P1 children to come up with a synonym for “beak” gaining particular notoriety.
A Scottish government spokesperson said: “The new contract will see the continued provision of online assessments for children and young people in P1, P4, P7 and S3. The primary difference is that instead of two online systems being delivered through two separate contracts, there will be a single contract and a single assessment platform, which will provide access to both the SNSA and the MCNG.”
