The pending reform of Scottish education must reverse a decade of a darkness about what goes on in Scottish classrooms, an education analyst says.
Lindsay Paterson, professor of education policy at Edinburgh University, said the SNP had made it extremely difficult for parents to find reliable information on how well schools were doing.
The method for testing pupils’ ability has been reformed twice in a decade, but Paterson said the measure used by the previous Labour-Liberal Democrat administration was superior to both SNP testing regimes.
The Scottish government has had to make changes again after the Scottish Qualification Authority (SQA) botched the handling of grades in the pandemic.
Ken Muir, former chief executive of the General Teaching Council for Scotland, has been commissioned to reshape education governance after the decision to scrap the SQA and the partition of the Education Scotland agency into policy and inspection agencies.
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In a submission to Muir, Paterson said the reforms must include improved statistics for measuring pupils’ progress and the education system.
Pupils were tested using the Scottish Survey of Achievement when the SNP took over in 2007. Paterson said this survey was highly effective in measuring the progress of pupils and weeding out teacher bias. The SNP replaced the survey of achievement in 2011 with the Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy, which was condemned by education experts as an inferior version of the SSA and lasted just five years.
The current method, the Scottish National Standardised Assessment (SNSA), was criticised this year by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which said it produced “questionable” data.
Shirley-Anne Somerville, the education secretary, has stood by the SNP’s current testing regime, and has yet to reveal how she will retain the SNSA, which tests every pupil, while fulfilling the OECD’s recommendation for a return to survey-based testing.
Paterson said the SNP should go back to square one and resurrect the survey of achievement which gave “a much more reliable statistical basis . . . for drawing inferences about the effects of school policies and teacher practices on pupils’ learning”.
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Paterson called on the SNP to take Scotland back into the international surveys of mathematics, science and literacy known as Timms and Pirls.
Scottish ministers withdrew from them in 2010, claiming they were too expensive and produced limited data on Scottish education. Critics said it was because they showed performance in Scottish education was declining.
The Scottish government has been contacted for comment.
