Education secretary John Swinney has told Scotland’s education directors that he remains committed to the controversial national assessments that have been such a headache for the government in recent months.
The Scottish National Standardised Assessments (SNSAs) for P1s, in particular, have prompted a grassroots campaign that insists they are inappropriate for children aged 4 and 5, while in September MSPs voted to call for a stop to the P1 assessments.
Addressing education directors’ body ADES yesterday, Mr Swinney said: “We’ve had a little bit of a bumpy exercise on P1 assessments.”
But the education secretary and deputy first minister - whose arrival at the ADES annual conference in Cumbernauld was delayed by Scottish government ministers having to react to yesterday’s Brexit-related events - said this had been “a classic example of politics getting in the way of good educational arguments”.
He added: “I hear disputed views about the value of P1 assessments within the education system, but I hear disputed views about every question in Scottish education - there’s nothing that attracts unanimity, everything is a matter of debate. Once you come to terms with that conclusion, you sleep much easier.”
Mr Swinney said the SNSAs were a response to the 2015 report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and its call for Scotland to amass more consistent data to help assess young people’s progress over an extended period of time. The SNSAs, he argued, showed that Scotland had made “substantive progress” in this area.
Last month, Mr Swinney announced that an independent review of the P1 SNSAs would be carried out and was scheduled to report back next May, although the tests will continue as planned in the current school year. Yesterday, the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee announced that it would carry out its own inquiry into the SNSAs, which started in 2017-18.
Mr Swinney said the independent review would be “more satisfactory” than the 2 hours and 20 minutes of parliamentary debate that led up to September’s vote, which he described as “unsatisfactory and frankly rather predictable [and] driven by the fact that some people decided politically [that] they wanted to give the government a beating on that particular issue”.
Of the upcoming review, he also said: “We’ll pursue this process to get us into a position where we can have that reliable and consistent data assessment that enables us to support the journey to improvement.”
He added: “I don’t actually take the view that just having loads of data, of itself, improves education - it’s what you do with the data and how you interpret it [that counts].”
He also said that “most practitioners” he had met had said the SNSAs had made them “more informed” on issues such as “pedagogy, interventions and [pupil] performance”.
