Environmental studies guidelines have been back to the drawing board more often than the Mini. Their final epiphany has been awaited for my eight years as headteacher and have only just been revealed. This apparition coincides with 5-14 becoming 5-13, if squads of pupils in North Lanarkshire and elsewhere take the fast lane to Standard grade at the end of S3.

In many secondary schools, 5-14 modern languages, personal development and even expressive arts have never left the starting blocks.

The English and maths guidelines were welcomed as providing a national track for these core areas, within which teachers could improvise, develop and innovate, as they had done for decades. The five (now six) levels would be helpful in demonstrating to teachers and parents the progress made across a broadly defined curricular landscape. They were never intended, even by their most fervent advocates, to slot pupils into lanes of ability.

More nonsensical was the quantum leap towards using 5-14 levels in assessing the performance of schools. From the late Nineties, national surveys were carried out to ascertain the percentage of pupils achieving level E in English and maths by the end of S2. As the information was released into the public domain in some areas, it allowed the press to postulate a pseudo-scientific league table of schools, based on “nationally agreed statistics”.

Many teachers had not enthusiastically embraced national testing for 5-14 at this stage and they were invited to submit the best information available from their own records. This produced the most optimistic of guesswork and resulted in a rag-bag of spurious information across authorities. Some schools ostensibly produced prodigies at S2, who then appeared to slip into regression by the time Standard grade results appeared two years later.

Stirling Council’s recent study using standardised tests alongside national test levels manifested gaping discrepancies in the classification of pupils to levels. Principal psychologist Ian Liddle reported that Primary 5 pupils categorised as level C scored between 22 and 113 on the Edinburgh reading test scale. Such a chasm of variation would scarcely reassure the populace that level C meant a lot.

Mr McConnell and his colleagues should exercise caution and resist the temptation immediately to tinker in this area. He should not rely too heavily on 5-14 levels in any revamped system of national assessment, just as he would never accept football scores which carried a potential 500 per cent margin for error. “Scotland scored between 1 and 5 goals while Latvia scored between 2 and 10. The Scottish manager has decided to stay in post until the position is clarified by a five-year study.”

The argument for a nationally validated test, enabling targets to be set and progress plotted, is irrefutable. We can scarcely complain about the publication of raw statistics for Standard grade and Higher Still while resisting standardised assessments at earlier stages, which will demonstrate added value in an acceptable and reasonably scientific way.

As Edinburgh has adopted NFER-Nelson materials for baseline testing in English and maths at the beginning of S1, teachers in other subjects have shown a keen interest in the results. With all its blemishes, it is the first time that we have had a snapshot of ability of our whole intake. Harvesting meaningful 5-14 information from our 32 feeder primary schools was a hefty challenge, even with the benefit of the new national transfer document.

We need to test, but we equally need to beware of the maxim: “If it moves, test it. If it doesn’t move, test it till it does.”

Pat Sweeney is headteacher at Holy Rood High School, Edinburgh