FOR the Scottish Government to find itself in a position where key aspects of its defining mission to improve school performance cannot be measured is little short of scandalous.
The route to this unacceptable situation in literacy and numeracy is somewhat tortuous and involves the confused introduction of standardised national assessments.
The original expectation that the results of these assessments would be published – however controversial that would be been – would at least have provided comprehensive data on pupil performance that could have been compared year on year.
READ MORE: Five year data vacuum on basic skills
However, when it became apparent the publication of raw test data would be opposed by powerful teaching unions, a Plan B was needed.
This resulted in the publication not of the test data, but of the subjective judgements teachers had reached on the performance of their pupils informed by how well they had performed in the new assessments.
This appeased unions, but did not convince government statisticians who labelled the resulting statistics “experimental” because of a lack of reliability.
Unfortunately, by that time the Scottish Government had scrapped the Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy, which had revealed falling standards of literacy and numeracy in the first place.
This vacuum of data identified by the Scottish Parliament’s education committee is not something that can be resolved in the short term.
It relies on the teaching profession familiarising itself with the results of the standardised assessments and then using that data to inform their judgements in a way that is consistent across the country’s 32 local authorities.
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As MSPs have pointed out that could take at least five years, with no guarantee even then that it will be resolved.
To make matters worse, the Scottish Government has also withdrawn Scotland from two international surveys of pupil attainment in primary schools – one on mathematics and science and one on literacy.
As Lindsay Paterson, professor of education policy at Edinburgh University, pointed out last year there is now no indigenous Scottish data “with which to hold our rulers to account”.
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