Word on the grapevine is that the Scottish government is considering a change to standardised testing. It’s a rumour grown from fertile soil: as Tes Scotland revealed, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) review of the implementation of Curriculum for Excellence - released on 21 June - was not overly enamoured with the way progress in literacy and numeracy is monitored.

So how likely is it that, after running for the first time in only 2017-18, the Scottish National Standardised Assessments (SNSAs) that cost the government £1.2 million to develop, and £3.4 million to deliver in that first year, are on their way out?

If the Scottish government is serious about accepting the recommendations of the OECD review - which it has said it will do - it is, frankly, hard to see how the tests can continue to play a key role in monitoring pupil performance nationally.

Currently, the SNSAs are used to inform the annual Achievement of Curriculum for Excellence Levels figures, which monitor performance in reading, writing, listening and talking and numeracy.

Teachers run the online SNSAs in class but it is not the results of the tests that are reported. Rather, teachers use the tests to inform their judgement and then they conclude whether or not pupils in P1, P4, P7 and S3 are hitting the expected level for their age and stage. This information is gathered up in June and then reported on every December.

School assessment: Will the SNSAs survive?

The OECD review found, however, that reporting on the levels “has its limitations”. It pointed out that the Curriculum for Excellence levels were meant “to support teacher planning and judgement and not to measure national progress”.

It added: “Small changes in data of this kind cannot give the system the intelligence it needs to monitor the achievement of particular groups of students within the cohort.”

It also said that the “usefulness and purpose” of the SNSAs was “already being questioned” and that - while the tests were designed to provide data to support teacher judgement and information for system monitoring - “it is questionable whether census-based assessments of this kind can serve both purposes well”.

So far, so damning. The report concludes: “Scotland could redevelop a sample-based evaluation system to collect robust and reliable data necessary to support curriculum reviews and decision making.”

So, is that the direction we are headed in? When Green education spokesperson Ross Greer asked education secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville about the future of the tests in the Scottish Parliament the day after the review was published - on 22 June - she said scrapping the standardised tests was not a specific recommendation in the OECD report.

She added: “Assessment was mentioned and I am aware that the issue was mentioned in the webinar yesterday, but national standardised assessments are a key element of our improvement agenda as part of the national improvement framework. They allow us to have consistent, objective and comparable information.”

Of course, we have been here before with sample surveys. Can you remember what preceded the SNSAs? Anyone? That’s right: a sample survey called the Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy (SSLN), which reported on literacy and numeracy in alternate years.

At the time it was scrapped - the SSLN reported for the last time in 2017 - the Scottish government was warned it should maintain it, not least because it would have meant reliable, comparable data continued to be gathered while the SNSAs were established. The government ignored these warnings and now, after just three years of data - given reporting on Achievement of CfE Levels was suspended last year owing to Covid - we face a return, once again, to year zero.

That’s not to say that the SSLN was not scrapped for good reason: that decision came about on the back of the previous OECD review published in 2015 that found “light sampling of literacy and numeracy at a national level has not provided sufficient evidence” about the strengths and weaknesses of Scottish education.

This raises the question as to why sampling would be recommended again. Well, it is not just the recommendations of a review that are important but how they are interpreted and implemented.

All this would suggest that Scotland does not just need to know what is wrong with Curriculum for Excellence - but it needs ongoing support in order to fix it. Because, undoubtedly, if the SNSAs are scrapped, the next thing we need to worry about is: what will replace them? And if we look at it historically, it is that next bit that seems to be the biggest struggle.

Emma Seith is a reporter at Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith

This article originally appeared in the 9 July 2021 issue under the headline “The SNSAs could be snuffed out - but what comes next?”