Dear Editor,

The latest revelations that the SNP government had misrepresented the work of academic experts in order to bolster support for their faltering policy on P1 school testing, which has already been heavily criticised by the Scottish Parliament, is simply unbelieveable.

At the end of last year, South Lanarkshire’s SNP administration rejected a move by Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors to consider ending the P1 tests in the area – but only on the casting vote of the provost.

On August 16, Education Secretary John Swinney claimed on BBC Radio Scotland there were “people who emphatically argue for P1 assessments”.

After a Scottish Liberal Democrat Freedom of Information request asked who these people were, the Scottish Government identified Dylan Wiliam, emeritus professor of educational assessment at University College London.

Professor Dylan William, who features heavily in resources on Education Scotland’s website and provides guidance on assessment, obliterated the claim he supports P1 national testing, saying it was a “perverse, misrepresentation” of his work.

He continued: “The kind of standardised assessments used in the Scottish national assessments of Primary 1 children are simply incapable of providing the kind of information that I think teachers would need in order to teach better.”

Subsequently a second expert relied on by the Scottish Government, Professor W. James Popham of the University of California, described the assertion that he backed P1 testing as “flat-out incorrect” (The Herald).

My colleague, Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Tavish Scott MSP, has already demanded an apology from the Education Secretary for what he described as “the Scottish Government brazenly twisting the work of an esteemed academic who adamantly opposes their national testing policy.”

Now we have a second academic who says his backing for the controversial policy is “flat-out incorrect”. These are the only two experts quoted.

Their obliteration of both the policy and claims of support is devastating for the SNP. The Scottish Government’s claims of academic backing for doomed national testing have now utterly fallen apart.

It makes nonsense of our own South Lanarkshire SNP council administration’s insistence on barging ahead with these unwanted P1 tests, despite the growing evidence that they are next to worthless – and now this pretty blatant attempt by the SNP Scottish Government to mess about with, and misrepresent, the views of independent academics. In my book, it says it all when you have to fiddle the evidence in order to sustain your case.

I am sure local parents will take a pretty dim view of manoeuvres like this. Fabricating fictional “emphatic” support to keep a dead policy afloat is a new low.

This expert’s reasons for condemning national testing of P1s echo those of teachers throughout the country, parents and the Scottish Parliament who conclusively voted months ago to halt P1 testing. Evidence and expertise should be at the heart of every policy.

It is now clearer than ever that the SNP’s damaging national tests have neither evidence nor expertise to back them.

It is time for South Lanarkshire to opt out of the testing of five-year-olds in our local schools.