THERE are testing times ahead for Scottish education.
For the past decade, when anyone voiced concerns over school progress, the answer always came back that the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) was coming and that it would solve all ills. Well it is here and it hasn't.
Introduced amidst widespread expectations that it would raise standards, close the attainment gap and prepare pupils for the rapidly changing economy of the future, CfE is struggling with the basics. Recent reports by Scotland's Chief Statistician found standards of literacy and numeracy in Scottish schools had actually fallen since the introduction of CfE.
With opposition politicians ever keen to attack the Government, this decline has provided rich pickings with the Scottish Conservatives already calling for a return to standardised testing. In 2003, the former Labour-led Scottish Executive scrapped the last vestiges of national testing because of the concern teachers had become overly-focused on "teaching to the test" rather than educating pupils.
As a result, the national survey of five to 14 attainment, which tested every pupil in primary school and the first two years of secondary school, was replaced by a system of scientific sampling to track the performance of a proportion of pupils.
There have been creeping concerns since then that the education system is now short of the sort of vital information that tells us how well our primary schools are performing.
This was voiced in an Audit Scotland report from 2014 which noted there were no comparable measures available at a council and national level on the performance of pupils from P1-S3. The report concluded new performance measures should be developed to "provide an overall picture of educational attainment and achievement across Scotland".
Fuelled by the findings of the literacy survey, Conservative leader Ruth Davidson used First Minister's Questions to call for a new system of primary testing "so that we all can see which schools need help and which schools are leading the way".
Interestingly, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon refused to rule out such a move, responding: "I openly acknowledge that while we do have ... a wealth of data about the performance of secondary school pupils, we do not have that same data on primary school pupils."
This has been interpreted somewhat over-enthusiastically by some in the media as the SNP actively looking to reintroduce national testing but Ms Sturgeon has decided the time is right to take a long, hard look at what we actually know about how well our primary schools are performing.
But there is another consideration. While the introduction of CfE has seen a unity of purpose between the Scottish Government and teaching unions any move towards standardised testing would promptly bring that to an end.
Powerful teaching unions such as the EIS have backing CfE because they see it as an explicit rejection of the failure of the target setting, test-passing approaches of the past and they will fight tooth and nail to prevent any return to it in future.
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