Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government remains committed to the P1 assessments, and the SNSA in general.

The SNSA are diagnostic assessments designed to identify next steps in learning for children and young people. Identifying strengths or concerns about a child’s digital skills are very much part of everyday learning and teaching, as are the SNSA. The User Review highlights the concern about digital skills and in some instances questions have been re-designed or replaced. To minimise the range of digital skills required by young children, there has also been a reduction in the number of drag and drop type questions. This does not impact on the diagnostic value of the questions but will have a positive impact by making the assessment more user friendly.

The Scottish Government reflected on the comments from EIS members and others as part of our User Review of the SNSA. As the User Review makes clear, a number of enhancements are being made to the SNSA system as a result of the comments received.

As set out in the User Review, Scottish Government and Education Scotland officials held a number of focus groups with teachers and observed a number of children and young people carrying out the assessments and discussed their experience with their teachers. It was clear from these sessions that, overall, the children involved enjoyed the assessments.

The Scottish Government recognises that there are differing views on the reports generated by the SNSA system. One teacher commented that “Data is incredibly detailed and personalised. Feedback will be very useful in looking for next steps.” We will continue to look to enhance SNSA reports to ensure they are well matched to Curriculum for Excellence and provide high quality information for teachers.

A small number of teachers made these comments, through the EIS survey and first-hand discussions and observations with those carrying out the assessments. For 2018-19, we are introducing a more systematic user feedback process to hear directly from children and young people themselves. At the end of each assessment, a short age-appropriate survey will be available to encourage them to feedback on their experience.

We have offered schools maximum flexibility on carrying out the assessments and there were a number of successful approaches, including through the use of one-to-one support. Working in small groups and on a one-to-one basis is part of everyday teaching and learning in Primary 1.

The Scottish National Standardised Assessments are adaptive assessments and can only be provided online. It was a key requirement in the development of the SNSA that the online system is compatible with a wide variety of technical platforms, devices and internet bandwidth connectivity available within Scottish local authorities and schools. No concerns were raised by local authority representatives or professional organisations about IT capability, in large part because most schools already have the necessary capability and capacity given that they have undertaken existing standardised assessments on digital platforms for some time.

Paragraph 31 of the User Review refers to the face to face feedback provided about the assessments at all stages (P1, P4, P7 and S3) as part of focus groups with schools and local authorities and classroom observations. These 9 focus groups and 6 classroom observations involved more than 50 teachers and other professionals, the vast majority of whom indicated their satisfaction with the reports.

This is feedback from the Accessibility Advisory Group, as well as from training events with ASN staff and discussions with local authorities. The Accessibility Advisory Group contains practitioners, local authorities and organisations involved in ASN such as Call Scotland.