John Swinney: Improving Scottish education is my mantra

John Swinney has said he has a “relentless focus” on improving the education system in Scotland, despite concerns being raised over standardised assessments.

Speaking to the Education Committee at Holyrood on Wednesday, the Education Secretary said the tests work as a “diagnostic tool” for teachers in identifying where pupils need to improve.

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Scottish national standardised assessments (SNSA) were introduced for P1, P4, P7 and S3 pupils to help measure the attainment gap in schools.

John Swinney, Deputy First Minister of Scotland. Picture: John Devlin.John Swinney, Deputy First Minister of Scotland. Picture: John Devlin.
John Swinney, Deputy First Minister of Scotland. Picture: John Devlin.
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Mr Swinney said: “Fundamentally, the approach that I’m bringing to the education system is that I want to create a constantly improving education system - that is my mantra.

“I think in previous appearances before this committee I’ve said that I had a relentless focus on improvement, and that’s exactly what drives the agenda that we’re pursuing.”

The tests have been criticised by a number of teachers, as well as teaching unions, who say they do not add value to the evaluation of pupil performance.

A submission to the committee by EIS referred to a survey of its members following the first year of SNSAs being used in schools.

It read: “The majority of comments in response to the question of its utility to learning and teaching were critical of the value of SNSA data. The reasons cited were largely the unreliability of the assessment data in the context of wider assessment - in many cases the evidence provided was not in line with the wealth of information elicited by more valid and reliable means.

“Many teachers commented that the SNSAs provided little to nothing in the way of new information to inform their understanding of children’s progress and next steps in learning.

“Some explicitly referenced them as a waste of valuable time for this reason.”

Mr Swinney said the SNSA system would assist the judgements made by teachers at the end of the school year over whether a pupil has achieved the Curriculum for Excellence (CFE) level relevant to their stage.

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“We will not have an improving education system in Scotland if the education and the performance of children is not improving,” said Mr Swinney.

“Therefore the improvement has to be felt within an individual classroom.

“Improvement in the system is not an amorphous thing that floats about in the ether - it is driven by what is the performance of individual children, which is why we’ve opted to ask for teachers’ judgement about the satisfactory achievement of levels at the different levels of CFE.

“It’s not just about me being focused on improvement, or even local authorities, it’s individual class teachers having the available data to help them to improve the performance of young people’s education.

“My job is to make sure that the education system is well supported and well resourced to enable that work to be undertaken at classroom level.”