Ministers ‘misrepresented’ my work on P1 testing, says academic
Scotland’s education secretary has been accused of “fabricating” support for controversial national tests for P1 pupils after a leading academic said his views had been misrepresented by ministers.
Dylan Wiliam, an education expert at University College London, was named by the Scottish Government as one of a number of people who were “emphatically”infavourofthe assessments.
But he described this as a “perverse misrepresentation” of his work, adding that the P1 tests in Scotland are “incapable” of helping teachers and are “almost completely useless”.
The EIS teaching union has claimed that the assessments – which are also taken by pupils in P4, P7 and S3 as part of efforts to monitor their progress – are causing “extreme anxiety” among P1 children.
Last September Holyrood’s
0 The Scottish Government’s primary one assessments have proved controversial
opposition parties united to pass a motion in favour of scrapping the P1 tests, prompting education secretary John
Swinney to order a review. During a radio phone-in last August, Mr Swinney told listeners that there were “people who emphatically argue for P1 assessments”.
In response to a Freedom of Information request asking for the names of these supporters, the Scottish Government cited Mr Wiliam’s work.
It said he “presents research that shows formative assessment practices have a much greater impact on educational achievement than most other reforms”.
But speaking yesterday, the academic accused ministers of “a substantial, and I would say perverse, mis-
representation of my work”. He added: “The kind of standardised assessments used in the Scottish national assessments of primary one children 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 that these assessments are almost completely useless.”
Liberal Democrat education spokesman Tavish Scott described the affair as “nothing short of unbelievable” and called for Mr Swinney to apologise to MSPS immediately.
“The Scottish Government has brazenly twisted the work of an esteemed academic who adamantly opposes their national testing policy,” he added.
A Scottish Government spokesman said: “We referenced Professor Wiliam as a supporter of a formative approach to assessment. It was not our intention to imply he supported SNSA [Scottish National Standardised Assessments] and it is clear that he does not.”