David Leng - the Scottish government official with a key role in the development of new national literacy and numeracy assessments - was clearly concerned about the reception he would get when he stepped up to deliver a seminar about the tests this morning.

Yesterday, MSPs voted to halt the Scottish National Standardised Assessments (SNSAs) in P1. Education secretary John Swinney is expected to make a statement to Parliament “in due course” about next steps, but in the meantime, schools and teachers have been told to continue delivering the tests.

However, Mr Leng - whose official title is “SNSA product owner” - revealed at the Scottish Learning Festival in Glasgow that new national tests in Gaelic, which were expected to be introduced last month, have been put on hold until more is known about the future of the English version.

Mr Leng told the seminar that his biggest frustration, given the negative attention the tests were attracting, was with the “misunderstanding” of the purpose of the assessments. He said he wanted to “demythologise some of the stuff that has been said both publicly and in Parliament”. He started by reiterating the point of the tests - or rather, stating what they were not intended for.

“People are still misunderstanding what the standardised assessments are about,” said Mr Leng. “They are still assuming that they are some sort of high-stakes national tests to create some sort of big data for government that is then going to be used, in a sense, to judge the education system.

“That’s what people still think. That’s not what they are about.

“The point of the SNSAs is that the teachers on the ground in schools get information that helps them understand pupil progress and next steps.”

The data that would be collected nationally in June and published every December were the teacher judgements about whether pupils were hitting the expected level for their age and stage, he said.

According to Mr Leng, despite negative media coverage, the first year of the tests was “very successful” with 570,000 pupils sitting them, amounting to 94 per cent of the potential cohort of P1, P4, P7 and S3 pupils.

However, he highlighted some of the issues that have been preoccupying teachers, including the difficulties P1 children had in navigating the tests, given their lack of digital skills, and the perception that they were simply too hard.

The notorious “hummingbird question” - a multiple-choice question that involved P1 children having to pick out a synonym for “beak” - had been removed this year, said Mr Leng, and 30 per cent of the questions were replenished. Other steps taken to address concerns included reordering questions so that “children have a more positive start”, as well as redesigning questions to reduce the amount of scrolling and click-and-drop that P1 pupils would have to do.

He said a P1 practitioner-improvement forum would be up and running by next month, chaired by an academic, and that pupils would soon be able to rate the tests using smiley faces - in a system he likened to that used by aeroplane passengers to quickly rate their experience going through security checks.

One of the major worries, however, was the impact of the tests on children. Some schools have reported pupils crying and shaking as a result of having to sit the assessments; one primary depute head even said a child had “soiled themselves due to the extreme distress”.

Mr Leng said he had been very concerned by the stories coming out of schools. But “a key part of that” was how “the classroom environment” was managed and case studies were being drawn up so that schools could learn from each other. But he did acknowledge that access to technology could be a problem for schools, and that in the worst-case scenario pupils could end up doing the assessments on the only school computer, situated outside the classroom, with Wi-Fi that did not work well.

Mr Leng conceded that no product typically starts off being perfect, before ending the seminar by reiterating that the focus of the tests was on providing high-quality data for teachers - not for government.