Your New Fact Checker Service Ruth Davidson’s schoolchildren illiteracy claim is ... FALSE

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NICOLA Sturgeon has faced pressure in recent weeks over her Government’s record on education. In an attack at First Minister’s Questions in the Scottish Parliament on May 4, Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson cited figures on the literacy of children leaving primary school. She said: “The SNP has been in sole charge of education for a decade, and these failings are inexcusable. One in five children leave school functionally illiterate.”

The Ferret Fact Service (FFS) found her claim was based on an inaccurate interpretation of the statistical data.

HERE’S THE EVIDENCE:

Statistics on literacy and numeracy are collated in alternate years in the Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy (SSLN).

The “one in five” statistic Davidson cited comes from the 2014 report on literacy. The most recent 2016 results came out on May 9, days after her claim. A sample of Scots pupils in P4, P7 and S2 are tested to establish their reading, writing, listening and talking skills.

They are then put into categories based on their percentage of correct answers: either “performing very well at the level”, “performing well at the level”, “working within the level”, or “not yet working within the level”.

The Scottish Conservatives provided FFS with a table to support Davidson’s claim, which referred to S2 pupils who left primary school two years before. To reach the one in five figure they included all those with reading skills that were either “working within the level” or “not yet working within the level” in their definition of functionally illiteracy. Crucial to the claim from Davidson was that one in five are functionally illiterate when they leave primary school, not when they are in second year of high school.

In the 2014 statistics, 12 per cent of those tested for reading skills in P7 were in the bottom two categories and hence within the Tories’ definition, while 33 per cent were in the bottom two categories on writing. The party may have combined these two figures to come up with the “one in five” statistic.

But what does functionally illiterate actually mean? The Conservatives’ analysis requires those children “working within the level” on reading and writing to be considered functionally illiterate. However, the SSLN survey does not use functional illiteracy as a measure, and a spokeswoman confirmed the figures only relate to “pupils not yet working within the expected Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) levels”.

She told FFS it is “not correct” to associate the bottom two categories of performance with functional illiteracy, which is a term most often used to refer to adults.

FUNCTIONAL illiteracy is used to differentiate purely illiterate (unable to read or write) from those who have basic skills but have insufficient adult literacy. Unesco defines someone with functional illiteracy as a “person who cannot engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective function of his or her group and community”. A number of studies have given different figures for UK-wide adult and school leavers’ functional illiteracy but there is no consistent definition for the term.

The most recent survey shows that literacy skills of Scotland’s school pupils have worsened over the last four years. But the Scottish Conservatives’ reference to functional illiteracy is not based on correct interpretations of the data. As such, the Ferret Fact Service verdict is: False The claim from Ruth Davidson that one in five pupils leave primary school functionally illiterate is false. The term is not used in the study she references and cannot be accurately applied to children in Scotland. The Ferret Fact Service (FFS) at https:// theferret.scot/ is Scotland’s first non-partisan fact-checking service. We check statements from politicians, pundits and prominent public figures about issues the public are interested in. Just launched, FFS works to the International Fact-Checking Network code of principles.