TEACHERS are considering a boycott of a key plank of the SNP Government’s flagship education policy on the standardised assessments of pupils.

The Educational Institute of Scotland – the largest teaching union – is to debate whether its members should be balloted on withholding the results from the controversial tests.

Under the plan, standardised assessments will be introduced from August as part of the National Improvement Framework.

Pupils in primary one, four and seven, as well as in third year at secondary school, will be assessed on their reading, writing and working with numbers. The new regime will replace the existing patchwork system of local authority assessments.

Green MSP Ross Greer said teachers would be “well within their rights” to snub a Government policy he said was not backed up by evidence.

John Swinney, the Cabinet Secretary for Education, believes the new data will provide greater detail on the attainment gap and allow informed spending decisions to be made.

However, the EIS, which has over 60,000 members, has previously hit out at any attempt at introducing “crude” and “high stakes” testing that could lead to the reintroduction of league tables.

The EIS will ramp up the debate on assessments at its AGM, which is the union’s key policy-making forum, in Perth in June.

A motion submitted by the East Renfrewshire Local Association flags up an industrial ballot on teachers snubbing the new system: “That this AGM resolve that, if the Scottish Government implements national standardised testing which the EIS determines as detrimental to learning and teaching in schools, all members in primary and secondary schools will be balloted on a boycott of the administration and reporting of the test results.”

The Herald: Education Secretary John Swinney with EIS general secretary Larry Flanagan at the teaching union's headteachers' conference in Edinburgh

Picture: Swinney and EIS general secretary Larry Flanagan

If a boycott was supported, Swinney and local authorities would struggle to get the data that underpins the new policy.

Teachers will play a key role in the new assessments and headteachers and councils would have to step in if a boycott was implemented.

Other motions scheduled for debate include investigating the potential for using wealth taxes to increase spending on education.

Greer, who is the Scottish Greens’ education spokesperson, said: "Teachers would be well within their rights to boycott the proposed national testing regime. The Scottish Government have no evidence to suggest that there is an educational benefit to this policy and frontline teachers have been very clear about how unwelcome it is. With huge issues around teacher workload, the burden of additional testing is the last thing our classrooms need, even before we get to the stress and anxiety it will cause amongst children as young as six, the point at which the testing will begin.”

Scottish Labour education spokesman Iain Gray said: “The SNP’s standardised assessment policy has been a shambles from beginning to end. John Swinney was supposed to be a safe pair of hands, but he is fumbling the ball on schools yet again.”

An EIS spokesperson said: "While the EIS does not comment on the specifics of any AGM Motion in advance of the debate, the authors of this particular motion are clearly reflecting a commonly held concern within the teaching profession about the potential impact of standardised testing on wider learning and teaching."

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “The new standardised assessments will simply replace the existing assessments already used in most schools in Scotland. They will not increase workload for teachers or children but they will help check progress in literacy and reading, automatically generating information for teachers on where a pupil is doing well and where further support may be required.”