Almost three years after the Scottish Parliament voted to scrap them, the notorious P1 tests of literacy and numeracy are still there - and the controversy still rages.

But things may be about to change. Owing to the recent Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) review of Curriculum for Excellence, Scotland’s new education secretary, Shirley-Anne Somerville, is taking another look at the Scottish National Standardised Assessments (SNSAs) which are also sat by pupils in P4, P7 and S3.

Thousands of professionals in childcare, education, public health and social work earnestly hope she’ll consider the evidence that, for five-year-old children, the focus of assessment should be on overall development, not the three Rs. 

Support for early child development is the best way to close the poverty-related attainment gap and provide the best possible educational foundation for all Scotland’s children. Yesterday, I posted her a copy of a book, Play is the Way, with a covering letter directing her to chapter 13.

OECD report: Replace standardised tests with sample survey

Background: MSPs vote to scrap national tests for 5-year-olds

Related: Scrap ‘cruel’ testing of five-year-olds, say Scottish campaigners

News: Government under fire over failure to cancel testing

The figures: Literacy and numeracy statistics show modest gains

This chapter, by two public health academics, describes an internationally recognised assessment tool for five-year-olds called the Early Development Instrument (EDI).

It is used in Canada and Australia to great acclaim and was successfully trialled in East Lothian a few years ago but was ignored at a national level. Perhaps it was dismissed because it was designed by public health experts, as opposed to educationists.    

Yet the EDI is clearly a more appropriate type of assessment for five-year-olds than the SNSA because, as Unesco explains, “early childhood, defined as the period from birth to eight-years-old, is a time of remarkable growth, with brain development at its peak...Early childhood care and education (ECCE)…aims at the holistic development of a child’s social, emotional, cognitive and physical needs in order to build a solid and broad foundation for lifelong learning and wellbeing”. 

Realising the Ambition, Scotland’s excellent new practice guidance for early years, makes the case for high-quality ECCE very clearly and covers the whole of Curriculum for Excellence’s “early level”, including P1. 

The EDI would sit very comfortably alongside this and would help direct the attention of parents, teachers and - perhaps most importantly - local authority policymakers towards the importance of overall development in early childhood.

P1 teachers would then feel able to provide the time, space and sensitive support that five-year-old children need to grow and learn through play, rather than pressurising them to acquire literacy and numeracy skills for which many are not developmentally ready.   

However, the original intention of the EDI was not to improve the lot of five-year-olds. It was designed to provide information needed at a local level for effective targeting of resources during the earliest years of children’s lives. All long-term research suggests that support in the preschool years is the best way to improve the life-chances of children raised in poverty and thus achieve a reasonable degree of social justice. (The authorities in East Lothian were so impressed by the EDI’s effectiveness in this respect that they forked out themselves to repeat it a couple of years later.)

This sort of approach means, of course, that policymakers (nationally and locally) have to see the assessment of five-year-olds through a public health lens. It isn’t a problem in Canada and Australia, where formal schooling doesn’t start until children are six. But Scotland’s early school starting age means our five-year-olds belong to the education system - which is why they were roped into the SNSA, with the focus on the three Rs.

Tragically, even if Ms Somerville decides to drop the P1 SNSA, bureaucrats will still see this age group as part of their domain. Unless she also introduces the EDI, each local authority will almost certainly reintroduce the tests of literacy and numeracy skills they used before the SNSA appeared. And everything will be as it was, which will mean that the attainment gap will continue to grow, additional support needs will continue to soar, mental health problems among schoolchildren will continue to spiral out of control, and Scotland will be an ever more unequal society.  

Sue Palmer is a former primary headteacher, and is also an author and chair of Upstart Scotland