As various people have said, the word “confusion” keeps coming up. My view is a bit different from other people’s because of my interaction with the issue. Before coming here, I looked through all the material that I have dug up over the past three and a half years—all the email chains, documents, policies and everything that has shifted all over the place—and “confusion” is the word that sums up everything most effectively.
As Darren Northcott said, we have a situation whereby we claim to be trying to have a testing system that will perform a summative function, which is about ensuring that teacher judgment is reliable and that we can trust it—which is a whole separate debate. Apparently, we are also using the assessments, as has been said, as a formative assessment to tell teachers more about each child in the class. I agree that the notion that we will be able to combine those two functions in a single assessment is optimistic at best. I would be surprised if there was any evidence to show that it is likely to be possible. In trying to do both jobs at once, we are probably doing neither of them well and potentially doing quite a lot of damage while we are doing that.
It goes back to the origins of it all. When the testing system was put forward initially, it was clearly conceived to be about national-level data. It was going to be a national measurement because that was what we needed. Ultimately, that is why it has incorrectly been seen as having replaced the SSLN.
We then go from there to saying, “Well, we’ll just use the test to inform teacher judgments, so that’ll be the national picture and the test will be part of the teacher judgment as well.” However, when we confuse the two purposes of the test, we are also in the position of saying, “We trust teachers to make these judgments and we’re going to rely on teacher judgment as a national measure of an education system”. Somehow, however, we do not trust teachers to make those judgments, unless they are using a standardised testing system that we think has two or three different purposes.
That goes on all the way through the testing system. There is no level of the testing system that I have looked at over the past three and half years out of which some screaming contradiction does not come. To be honest, we are in a situation now where, three and a half years ago, a lot of people said we would be: in a committee discussing what a formative assessment is and what a summative assessment is, and whether we are ever going to get any closer to having some sort of magical testing system that gives us national data.
Confusion about summative and formative systems comes up all the time, as does the argument that this is some sort of formative testing system. It came up most recently when, in response to an FOI request, the Scottish Government cited two academics as having supported the policy. When they both said that that wasn’t true, the defence was, “Well, we thought that they supported formative assessment methods, so we’re really sorry if we misquoted them.”
I contacted one of those individuals, Professor Dylan Wiliam, and put to him the First Minister’s response during First Minister’s question time. My contact was actually for a story, but there are some things going on right now making it kind of hard to get stories in the press that are not to do with Brexit. His response was quite clear: the tests, specifically in primary 1, do not provide useful formative information. Anybody who knows anything about education will probably understand why Professor Dylan Wiliam saying that is quite a big deal.
We are not going to get any further forward—and that is before we even get to ideas about closing attainment gaps and dealing with poverty through schools—until we can nail down what the testing system is supposed to be about. We are still no closer to doing that three and a half years after Nicola Sturgeon’s “judge me on my record” speech in Wester Hailes.