The new national standardised assessment regime in Scotland will cost £3.4 million to deliver this year, exceeding original estimates by more than a million pounds - and costing more than three times the amount councils used to spend on standardised tests annually.
A Tes Scotland investigation has also revealed that the tests have cost a total of £1.2 million to develop, meaning the bill for the literacy and numeracy assessments will hit at least £4.6 million by the end of the school year in July. The true cost will be higher because the total excludes an additional 20 per cent for value-added tax.
Before the introduction of the national approach, Scottish councils spent more than £1 million on standardised assessment, a figure revealed by a Tes Scotland survey of 27 of the country’s 32 local authorities in 2015.
The costs revealed today have been attacked by opposition politicians and the EIS teaching union, which said teachers “retain serious reservations regarding the educational value of National Standardised Assessments”.
Meanwhile, a primary headteacher said that the P1 tests were too difficult, caused the five-year-olds in her primary school anxiety and stress, and took a month to complete because children needed one-on-one support.
Concerns have also been raised about whether schools have the computers to deliver the tests. Scottish Greens education spokesman Ross Greer told Tes Scotland that funds raised by parents at a school in his constituency had been used to buy devices for pupils to use to sit the tests.
The new national assessments in literacy and numeracy are being introduced this year for pupils in P1, P4, P7 and S3. When the tender for the contract to deliver the tests went out, it estimated the cost would be £10 million over five years, excluding value-added tax. Now, the government is saying the cost of the contract is expected to be “around £9 million over three years”. But the figures uncovered by Tes Scotland reveal half of that budget has already been spent.
A Scottish government spokeswoman said that the cost of this contract “is expected to be around £9 million over three years”. She added: “Scottish National Standardised Assessments were successfully rolled out to schools on time and within this budget - and we have robust processes in place to keep a tight rein on activity, costs and risks to secure the best value we can for the taxpayer.”
This is an edited version of an article in the 23 March edition of Tes Scotland. Subscribers can read the full article here. To subscribe, click here. This week’s Tes magazine is available at all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here.
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