I suppose that the focus of Liz Smith’s question was on assuring the community of the quality of the assessments. In that respect, the quality of the assessment instruments is fundamental. We are at pains and we take a lot of trouble, using our expertise, to ensure that the instruments are sound, robust and valid from a number of perspectives; that includes consulting carefully and widely with people in the education community—the stakeholders—to make sure that what we are assessing is what is important.
We need to know that what we are measuring is what we intended to measure. We ensure that it is by getting qualitative feedback from stakeholders—learners, teachers, people in Education Scotland and the Scottish Government, for instance—but we also have statistical tools to ensure that the assessments are measuring something coherent and meaningful and that it is not just a random form-filling exercise. We have a lot of quality assurance measures in place and we have tried to make their implementation transparent to the public.
As a number of the written submissions state, including mine, if the results of an assessment are not understood and not used, it does not matter how good the assessment is—it will be pointless. The reporting is a key element of that, and we have worked hard with the Scottish Government to ensure that the reports are clear, transparent and accessible.
There are different levels of reporting. Fundamentally, the school-level reports are designed to give teachers information about individual pupil performance. There are school-level reports, which aggregate some of the data in a way that we hope is transparent and useful for schools. There are also local authority reports, which have a wider aggregative purpose but also give local authorities a lot of detail so that they can analyse the results in their own ways, with support.
The third key element in making assessments valid, useful and quality assured is to ensure that there is a good mechanism for providing professional learning to schools, teachers and local authorities so that they can interpret the results clearly, intelligently and effectively. The training programme that SCHOLAR at Heriot-Watt University is running, which has been implemented alongside the assessments from the beginning as part of our contract, is therefore a key element. It is unusual internationally that there was the foresight to bring forward a professional development and training programme from the inception of the national assessments to ensure that they were used in the way that was intended.