How Scotland’s schools are being blighted by anti-testing ideology
There is no evidence that testing pupils’ knowledge has adverse effects on their mental health
Scotland's schools used to be the envy of the world. However, over the past quarter of a century, Scotland's performance in international league tables such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) has declined dramatically, with a drop of 18 points in mathematics, 11 in reading and seven in science. A change of 20 points is approximately equivalent to one year of mid-secondary schooling.
Yes, we have to accept that there was an impact from the pandemic. But since 2006, Scotland has gone from being the top Pisa performer in the UK in reading and maths, and equal first with England in science, to being slightly behind it in reading, and very far behind it in maths and science. The picture is not one of rising standards, but national decline.
Although the blame for this fall in standards can be traced to certain key decisions made by successive governments since devolution, I would argue that a fundamental factor has been the progressive nationalisation of education in Scotland which has seen more and more control over the system exerted from the centre.
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Falling standards must be addressed
This centralisation has exacerbated the impact of mistaken decisions, since they affect the whole system. While there is a need for a national framework in certain respects, such as a core curriculum, we need to balance this with more power and autonomy being given to councils and schools.
We should also recognise the difficulty of changing this, given the power wielded by an unaccountable educational establishment rather than Scottish Government ministers. We saw this in 2018, when John Swinney and Nicola Sturgeon attempted to put through their education Bills, only for the unions to oppose them. These Bills could have had a major effect in improving attainment.
There is now, I believe, a political consensus forming that falling standards, as evidenced by Pisa, must be addressed. I have identified five areas which need to be addressed, the most important of which are the curriculum and assessment.
There is a great deal of misunderstanding about the Curriculum for Excellence and it is important to understand what it is or, perhaps more importantly, what it is not. First, the CfE is not a curriculum in the traditional sense of that word which implies a set of subjects and standards used by primary and secondary schools so children learn the same things.
It is really no more than a mission statement set out by the Curriculum Review Group which was established by the Scottish Government in 2003 and which published its report in 2004. It is a set of principles or objectives with which no one would disagree.
However, when it was introduced, responsibility for its implementation shifted from its original authors to an entirely different group of people. As a result, there was no attempt to specify the content of the learning, only experiences and outcomes. This was its biggest weakness.
So, we need to implement a knowledge-rich core curriculum which allows schools a degree of autonomy to tailor teaching to their local context and, more importantly, to the individual needs of children. As part of this, we should abolish Education Scotland, while retaining an independent inspectorate, and replace it with a very small group of academics and teachers who have responsibility for the core elements of the curriculum. Furthermore, every primary school should have a curriculum director or, in the case of very small primary schools, access to one through their cluster.
Assessment is key
As important as the introduction of a core curriculum is assessment. Assessment, or the lack of proper assessment, is the single most important factor in understanding what has gone wrong in the Scottish system. It could be described as the fundamental fault from which all other problems arise. This may seem like a bold claim. Yet I believe it is supported by the evidence.
Systematic assessment provides us with the essential and necessary diagnostic tools for learning. Tests need to be devised in such a way that they can be used for diagnostic as well as accountability purposes. This, unfortunately, is not the case at present.
All teachers know what the purpose of testing is, but are hampered by a system which creates obstacles rather than makes life easier for them. Put simply, the standardised tests carried out at P1, P4, P7 and S3 are not linked to the curriculum or at least to what is being taught. And because there is no curriculum in the traditional sense of that word, testing is neither standardised nor objective. Instead, teacher judgment is imposed on meaningless data.
To understand how we have arrived here, we need to go back to 2003, when the Labour-Lib Dem coalition abolished national standardised testing. The rationale for this decision was that children learn better in an environment where the stress of testing is removed. Yet this decision had catastrophic consequences for Scottish education.
When Scotland began to slip even further down the Pisa tables, it became clear to the SNP that the mistake of 2003 had to be rectified. As a result, national standardised testing was reintroduced by Nicola Sturgeon in 2015. It was a welcome step in the right direction. But, thanks to firm union opposition, the results of the tests are still not published in full – even though the Scottish Government was keen on doing so at the time.
There is no evidence that testing children has adverse effects on mental health, yet a culture of anti-testing has been allowed to flourish and permeates the current educational consensus. This is the key ideological battle which needs to be fought and won if years of decline are to be reversed.
Tim Jones, a former teacher, is an Edinburgh councillor. This article draws on his contribution to the Wealthy Nation, Healthy Nation collection of essays published by the Centre for Policy Studies.
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