I was being diplomatic in my submission to the committee.
Yes—I still hold those views. To start with the second quote, it was about the situation concerning evidence. The context is that I was discussing the demise of almost all surveys of school students, including those of leavers or any other group. The only survey that remains is the programme for international student assessment, which is inadequate for most purposes; it is only for pupils who are aged 15 and so on.
I referred to 60 years, but we could even say that we need to go back nearly 80 years, because Scotland pioneered the use of good-quality surveys to understand the progress of people through education systems. From that came a series of things, including the Scottish school leavers survey, various surveys of primary school children, the SSLN, the SSA, predecessors to that, and the assessment of achievement programme. All of them have gone and are no longer used.
We do not now have the kinds of information that we had 20 years ago, for example, when the Parliament was established. We cannot monitor and it is impossible to know reliably whether we are closing the attainment gap, because we do not collect valid data. The Scottish index of multiple deprivation—the area thing—is not valid as a measure of social inequality.
I therefore hold strongly to the view that I expressed. I suppose that I feel strongly about it because my job is to do research, so perhaps you can discount my strength of feeling, because the situation means that I lack opportunities to do research.
On the first quote, which was about the use of the proposed SNSAs, the question is still very much open. I have been somewhat reassured by the approach that has been taken by the contractor that is doing the surveys—the Australian Council for Educational Research. The details and rigour of its approach as submitted to the committee and in its first annual report, and in information that Reform Scotland kindly helped me to get from freedom of information requests, show that it is trying to produce standard and reliable information that can be interpreted in the same way across Scotland.
However, there are still major worries. One is that we will not know when the child is tested. If we consider a child in primary 1, the difference between testing them when they arrive in September and just before they leave in June is about one sixth of the child’s development up to that point. That is an enormous amount of child development at such a young age. We could allow for that, statistically, in appropriately technical ways, if we knew when the child was tested but, as far as I understand it, that information will not be collected. Maybe I am wrong—I hope that I am.
That information is needed to enable us to standardise the test results and make sense of them at a national level. There are other circumstances that we will not necessarily know, such as the context in which the testing takes place. Some schools do it all at the same time, almost like an exam, as the Educational Institute of Scotland has pointed out. Others do it much more informally. Through teachers and parents, I hear of many schools in which testing is essentially integrated into the classroom environment.
A scientific study that was aware of such variation would collect information about the context and conditions in which testing was taking place. It can be standardised, so my original comment might be wrong, but I am still somewhat pessimistic about it at the moment.