Thank you, convener. I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the committee’s inquiry into the Scottish national standardised assessments.
When we published the draft national improvement framework in 2015, the Scottish Government set out how the SNSA results would help to inform teachers’ professional judgments of whether children had achieved curriculum for excellence levels, which remain our key and annually published measure in the national improvement framework. Such judgments take into consideration the full range of assessment evidence that is available to teachers. We have been clear throughout that the SNSAs were being introduced for diagnostic purposes, to provide teachers with objective, nationally consistent information about individual learners’ strengths and areas in which they might benefit from further support.
The national improvement framework in its entirety is the means by which we wish to review performance at every level in Scottish education—national, local authority and school. In response to the widely recognised need to improve the data on Scottish education, the national improvement framework takes an holistic look at the education system and brings together evidence and information from all levels of the system and across all aspects that impact on performance. The idea is that no one aspect takes precedence; rather, different parts of the system interact and connect with one another to drive improvement.
The assessment of children’s progress is one driver. Children’s progress is considered in its widest sense—from their development in the early years right through to their destination on leaving school—and the primacy of health and wellbeing is recognised throughout.
I highlight to committee members the value that SNSAs bring to Scottish education, to classroom practitioners and, most importantly, to children and young people. Assessment has long been recognised in Scottish education as a core aspect of daily learning. The SNSAs were designed specifically for the Scottish curriculum and, as such, should complement, rather than distract from, core learning. The information that the assessments generate is used by teachers expressly to direct to best effect the next steps in learning for individual learners.
We know that the overwhelming majority of local authorities have been using some form of standardised assessments for many years. The SNSAs remove the need for local authorities to buy in those various assessments. At zero cost to local authorities, they provide a set of nationally consistent assessments that are, for the first time, aligned to the curriculum for excellence and linked to the literacy and numeracy benchmarks.
On the comments that have been advanced about the SNSAs telling teachers nothing new, one perspective is that that is a strength, rather than a weakness, as it indicates that the assessments are correctly pitched and that teachers’ judgments of individual learners’ progress are predominantly sound. Equally, comments have been made about the value that SNSAs provide in ensuring moderation of performance across the system, resulting in greater confidence in the profession and vital diagnostic information when aspects of assessment outcomes suggest greater or lesser capacity than a teacher has expected.
It is certainly the case that SNSAs do not cover all aspects of literacy and numeracy in the curriculum, nor have they been designed to do so. However, attainment in literacy and numeracy has been identified as one of the key priorities in the national improvement framework. Literacy and numeracy are the core building blocks for learning across the curriculum and, as such, it is imperative that we identify early on in a child’s learning journey any obstacles to their progress in those areas.
Committee members have expressed great interest in returning to the Scottish survey of literacy and numeracy, either as it was, an enhanced version or run in parallel with the SNSAs. I understand the attraction of that objective; it was, after all, the Government’s own starting point. As is outlined in the Scottish Government’s evidence to the committee, we undertook a review of the SSLN in 2014. That review concluded that scaling up the survey model to produce local authority-level results was not a viable or realistic option—essentially, because that was not the purpose of the survey at its inception and the design of the survey did not lend itself to that kind of upscaling. In short, it cannot address the deficit in our data that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development identified and which the CFE levels data is designed to address.
It remains the strong belief of the Scottish Government that the SNSAs are the right thing to do, that they will bring value to broad general education in Scotland and, fundamentally, that they will bring value to children and young people, enabling all learners to reach their potential. That is not to suggest that the assessments, at this early stage in their implementation, are perfect. The need for continuous improvement is built into our contract with the assessment providers.
The Scottish Government is alive to the need to continue to work with practitioners to seek feedback and to identify means of enhancing the system. The primary 1 practitioners forum, the independent inquiry being undertaken by David Reedy and feedback from schools, teachers and—importantly—children themselves will all help to inform our next steps in that regard. We will strive to improve the operation of and communication around SNSAs, and I look forward to dialogue with the committee as part of that process.