Education and Skills Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, June 26, 2019

Official Report 557KB pdf

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Scottish National Standardised Assessments

Item 3 is consideration of the Government’s response to the committee’s report on Scottish national standardised assessments. We received comments on the response from Professor Lindsay Paterson, Connect, Upstart Scotland and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. I invite comments from members.

I am genuinely very disappointed by the Government’s response. The committee came together and produced a considered report with substantial recommendations. An awful lot of the body of the response basically says, “We believe something different—this is not our position.” Professor Paterson’s comments, along with the other comments, reflect that disappointment.

We could go through the response and identify a number of areas where there are issues. For example, there are real issues with the Scottish survey of literacy and numeracy. Another example is IT. We identified a problem with IT in talking more generally about STEM in schools. Somebody said that the one thing that was really needed was a better internet connection. We have a system that relies on young people being able to access tests through information and communications technology, so it is a big issue when someone says that that is not possible. The Government’s response is simply to say that it is not really a big issue.

I do not know what you want to do on the response, convener, but I think that we need to come back and look at it again. In my view, it is not acceptable for the Scottish Government to take a report from the committee and simply say, “Well, we don’t agree with you.”

There was some stuff about assessment that felt odd and did not match up with the seriousness of the report, which has been generally well received and is recognised as a balanced report. If we wanted the cabinet secretary simply to revisit his evidence to the committee, we would have asked him to do that. We asked him instead to respond to a series of recommendations that were agreed by the committee as a whole. I would be interested in hearing the views of other committee members on how we deal with the response.

I largely agree with that. The committee went to considerable lengths to produce a balanced report. We looked at the issues from different angles, and I thought that we produced quite a good report. Johann Lamont is right to say that the report has been well received. The Government’s response almost says, “I’m sorry, but you’re wrong”, which I do not think is acceptable.

Are we saying that it is not acceptable for the Government to take a different view?

No, we are saying that the Government has not picked up enough of the legitimate points that the committee raised.

We would have expected some engagement. The Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills is not going to agree with my view on the reality of primary 1 testing, but that does not mean that he should not engage with the evidence that the committee took and the conclusions that we all came to. The survey that I mentioned and issues to do with missing data and ICT are good examples of where the Government has simply not responded.

Where the committee said that we would like an update on how things are going, the response was to say, “Well, that is a matter for local authorities.” The Government cannot have it both ways. I did not expect the cabinet secretary to have a conversion on the road to Damascus and throw his hands up and say, “I’m completely wrong,” but I expected him, or the Scottish Government more generally, to engage with some of the serious recommendations. We as a committee do not agree on the fundamentals around testing, but we agreed on those recommendations, and they should have been taken more seriously.

Johann Lamont is right. To a degree, the issue is the tone of the response. Alasdair Allan is right too: the committee is not in a position to order the cabinet secretary to change his view. However, much of the response simply repeats what the Government said in the course of the inquiry. We considered that evidence and other evidence, and we took a view. The response does not acknowledge that at all.

The tone was pretty disappointing. I find that worrying, because we are putting in a great deal of effort—including later today—to produce a report on subject choice and the narrowing curriculum. On a number of occasions, the cabinet secretary has said that he will wait to see what that report says. For example, when the Conservatives brought a debate on that topic to the chamber, he was very critical of them and said, “Why are you doing this? The report is to come.” If a committee report is just going to pass him by completely, that is worrying. I do not know what we do about that, or how we make the point, but the response is disappointing.

Do members have any other comments?

I will not simply duplicate what colleagues have said. Like everyone else, I was not expecting the Government to say, “On the basis of your evidence, we got this wrong,” but I would have appreciated it if it had provided a detailed rebuttal of each of the points that we made or grappled with the evidence that we gathered and explained why it led it to a different conclusion. It has not done that. It could have issued its response before we started our inquiry. That is why I am frustrated with it. I would have expected the Government to explain why, on the basis of the same set of evidence, it came to different conclusions. I have not yet seen an explanation of that.

We could write to the Government, pointing to the Official Report of this meeting and the other responses that the committee received, and asking whether it would consider commenting further.

Iain Gray made the point that we cannot direct the Government, but, if a decision of the Parliament does not direct the Government and the committees do not direct the Government on policy, we have a problem. We can argue about the policy, but there seems to be no way in which we can influence it. I think that the best way for us to influence policy would be for the Government to be open to taking seriously what the committee says.

The convener suggested that we write back to the Government. I would like to have time to reflect on what I would like to be included in that letter. Perhaps members could contribute to that. As I have said, there are areas in which we are not going to agree, but there are some serious points to be made. Even if we accept the basic premise of testing, there are issues with the way in which the process is being carried out—I am talking about the fact that the tests can be done at any point in the year, for example. It would be good for all of us to have the opportunity to feed into that, albeit that we would still have to agree the letter. There are some quite substantial points that I would like to be made in the letter.

Are members content for that to come back on to the agenda after the summer recess?

Members indicated agreement.

10:52 Meeting continued in private until 12:34.