Chamber and committees

The OECD was clear. Even though it was not in the headline recommendations, the text underneath those headline recommendations had some significant criticism of your current data collection process. Do you accept that recommendation?

Do you accept that it appears like it is an afterthought? It was not included in the Feeley report and there was no children’s equivalent of the Feeley report. Fiona Duncan from The Promise Scotland has expressed what I would classify as real concern. Is it an afterthought or have you gathered evidence on it?

Baselining that funding for the additional teachers will help, but I hope that you will also look at the funding for PEF. It is allocated on an annual basis, which has an impact on the temporary arrangements that are available to schools.

On the Scottish national standardised assessments, I note that, on page 128 of its report, the OECD stated that

“the purpose and usefulness of these are already being questioned.”

It also told us that its team did not consider the SNSA

“to be the most appropriate system monitoring mechanism”.—[Official Report, Education, Children and Young People Committee, 8 September 2021; c 19.]

Are you therefore going to stop collecting assessment data across the country?

Schools have used formative assessments for generations. I understand that. My issue is that you collect the results and produce a national report that now leads to the publication of crude league tables. A school in the First Minister’s constituency was highlighted as apparently being one of the worst-performing schools in the country. I do not believe that for a minute: I believe that that school is probably performing well, but that because of its demographics and background, it is assessed as being one of the worst schools. That cannot be good for the Scottish education system.

If you stopped collecting that data nationally and using it for monitoring purposes, but allowed teachers to continue using it locally, that would be the best of all worlds. Why do you not stop collecting that information?

The crucial phrase in that was “light sampling”. You could have heavier sampling and still keep a sampling model rather than the model that you have adopted, which allows crude league tables to be published.

We have had reports from pupils and teachers about inconsistency—not only between schools but between subjects—in the evidence that was provided. How do you know whether there was consistency of evidence across the piece? We have considerable evidence that contradicts that.

My final question is on the moderation process. You were still looking at historical results to question individual performance or class performance.

There was pressure put back on and feedback provided to schools using historical information.

The system is yours. You devised it in partnership with others. Historical information was used to provide feedback, but surely that provided a cosh for schools that were previously disadvantaged and provided poorer performance. That pressure was not—

But you did not stop that.