Why we need benchmarks

FEW subjects are more emotive than education but the backlash sparked by plans to test primary one children has been nothing short of extraordinary.

Ministers contend that standardised assessments are vital to produce information about pupils’ skills, and without them there will be no evidence of any improvement (or slide) in classroom standards.

But there are calls for parents to boycott the tests because of their alleged capacity to traumatise five-yearolds – and growing parliamentary opposition could yet put a premature end to the initiative.

At the core of this row, which threatens to derail a key plank of the SNP’s schools reforms, is Scotland’s insular selfregard about its politics and its education system.

The dominant Scottish view is that we know already what to do to improve, and we don’t need scientific evidence, or at least don’t need it until children leave school altogether.

That might just about be tenable if things were rosy but we know from international comparative evidence that they aren’t.

The simple fact – unpalatable for many politicians and teaching unions – is that education can’t do without tests.

To see why, here’s an analogy. Imagine you’ve taken your baby to the doctor to see how their weight and height are progressing; you’re maybe looking for advice about diet, lifestyle, exercise and so on.

But you’d be taken aback if the doctor just chatted with you and played with the child – you’d expect some scientific measurements.

When you visited again in a couple of months, you’d expect another set of readings to see if your baby has made progress.

We’d all expect, too, that if the NHS was targeting resources at people whose babies were particularly at risk of poor growth rates, there would be reliable evidence to show what kind of people these are.

This might all seem rather obvious. So why isn’t it obvious for children in school? After all, no one seriously doubts that exams or other assessments are needed at the end of school and university.

Exams, essays, laboratory assessments, practical tests: they’re not perfect but they’ve turned out to be not bad as a way of fitting people to jobs in a way that builds on their talents. Objective tests are the fairest way of doing this.

That’s one major reason why women have made progress into the professions. Once women got access to exams on the same terms as men, their talents could be properly recognised.

So why the controversy? Let’s take a step back and ask why the Scottish Government decided to introduce tests in the first place.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has repeatedly asked to be judged on whether she has improved Scottish education.

In particular, she has said she wants to close the gap in attainment between children living in poverty and the rest.

Progress

When she came into office, she was therefore surprised to find that evidence to measure progress towards these targets just wasn’t there.

That’s one reason for the controversy: without evidence we can’t hold politicians to account.

But there’s another. All good teaching uses testing of some kind; you need that as a teacher so as to decide whether what you’re doing is working.

You need it as a parent to decide whether your child’s school is up to the mark. That means assessing children and then assessing them again to measure progress.

This applies even when children start school – some children at age five can already read, do elementary arithmetic and recite the most amazing scientific facts.

Others have not had the opportunity to do these things. A wise teacher has to know which is which.

If you try to teach reading to a child who already is quite a good reader, then they’ll be bored stiff. If you assume all the children in a class have learnt some reading at home, then some of them will be completely lost.

The same point about the need for reliable tests applies at successive school stages: secondary schools need to know how much pupils coming to them already know.

University departments need to know if their intake has enough mathematical or scientific or linguistic knowledge to benefit from specialist courses.

Again, this seems such common sense that a dispassionate observer might wonder what all the fuss is about.

The silliest reason for the public controversy stems from the fact that the tests are ‘standardised’. That term has a perfectly sound meaning in psychology.

It means a test that has been properly designed to be suitable for the age group and which tells us meaningful things about topics that matter: you don’t assess five-yearolds on advanced calculus.

But neither do you confine attention to elementary arithmetic because you have to have evidence that advanced children can do more.

It might have been better if the word had been something like ‘scientific’, analogous to a doctor’s instruments.

But what the critics of the tests seem to suppose is that using a standardised test is an attempt to fit every child into a standardised box.

That claim is based on either ignorance or misrepresentation, and it misses why scientifically well-designed tests are valuable to teachers. A teacher, just like a doctor, has to know that a test means something.

Another source of the controversy is the claim that children are being made anxious by the tests.

Now of course some level of anxiety is a spur to learning. If finding out what you have not learnt is worrying, then you have an emotional incentive to change. But there is no doubt that too much anxiety harms learning.

So is there a problem, especially for very young children?

It would indeed be pointless and cruel to judge five-yearolds in things they have not had a chance to learn. But that does not seem to be the intention (though it has to be said that the Scottish Government’s secrecy around the details of these tests does not help its case).

There is no reason why diagnostic tests should be stressful. It depends on the attitude of teachers and parents.

If these people are exaggerating the importance of the tests, then no wonder children are worried.

Politics

That brings us back to the politics of the matter, and one thing, sadly, is now certain – the public fuss has guaranteed that parents will indeed be worried about the tests.

They will unavoidably convey that worry to their children, as will teachers. So the children’s performance on the tests will be affected, and thus the critics’ criticisms become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That’s bad enough. How do the critics propose to provide teachers and parents and society with reliable evidence about the progress children are making in early primary?

Even more disturbing is the potential spill-over effect on attitudes to testing in general. If the anxiety caused to fiveyear-olds by tests is harmful to their education, then why is there any less harm from test anxiety at ages eight, 11, 14 or indeed in Nationals and Highers?

Scottish education is not disastrous but it’s mediocre. It certainly could do much better. Only reliable data from scientifically standardised tests can enable us to learn from both the failures and the successes.