Swinney ‘lied about expert backing tests’

Education: P1 assessments ‘useless’

The Scottish education secretary should apologise for “fabricating fictional support” for a controversial national testing scheme of primary one pupils, say the Liberal Democrats.

John Swinney told listeners to a BBC Radio Scotland phone-in in August that there are “people who emphatically argue for P1 assessments”.

The Lib Dems sent a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the Scottish Government asking for evidence to back up the claim, and the response named academics including Dylan Wiliam, emeritus professor of educational assessment at University College London.

The Government said he “presents research that shows formative assessment practices have a much greater impact on educational achievement than most other reforms”.

But Prof Wiliam rejected that claim, saying: “This is a substantial, and I would say perverse, misrepresentation of my work.”

“T h e k i n d o f standardised assessments used in the Scottish national assessments of primary one children

“The respondent to the FOI request is too stupid to be doing that job”

are simply incapable of providing the kind of information that I think teachers would need in order to teach better.

“While some might argue that these assessments may, under certain conditions, be regarded as ‘formative’, the unreliability of the assessments, combined with the unreliability of five-year-olds, means these assessments are almost completely useless as guides to the achievement and needs of five-year-olds.”

He questioned whether the FOI respondent believed what they wrote – meaning they are “too stupid to be doing that job” or being “deliberately misleading”.

Lib Dem education spokesman Tavish Scott said: “The Scottish Government has brazenly twisted the work of an esteemed academic who adamantly opposes their national testing policy.”

A spokesman for the Government said: “We referenced Prof Wiliam as a supporter of a formative approach to assessment.

“It was not our intention to imply he supported Scottish National Standardised Assessments and it is clear that he does not.”

‘FICTION’: John Swinney is accused of twisting the work of an education expert