We need to have “better information about attainment”, said Nicola Sturgeon, addressing the Scottish Parliament as first minister in September 2015. To that end, the Scottish government would establish “new national standardised assessments for pupils in primaries 1, 4 and 7, and in the third year of secondary school”, she said.
Today, Scotland does indeed have literacy and numeracy tests that take place in P1, P4, P7 and S3, although whether they are standardised has been the subject of some debate, given that pupils sit them at different times of year depending on their school and teacher.
This is all you need to know about the Scottish National Standardised Assessments (SNSAs):
What is the testing regime for primary pupils in Scotland?
The SNSAs are sat by pupils in P1, P4, P7 and S3 and focus on literacy and numeracy.
The tests are delivered online, are adaptive in that the level of challenge varies depending on how well a child answers and are taken “once in each school year at any point in time”.
There is no time limit for completing SNSAs and, where a teacher judges it necessary, a learner may take a break and come back to pick up the assessment where they left off.
On average, in 2023-24, the tests took pupils around half an hour to complete, according to an .
That year, 541,207 SNSAs were completed across Scotland, equivalent to about 88.3 per cent of the possible maximum number.
There is a Gaelic equivalent of the English medium tests for Gaelic-medium pupils, the Measaidhean Coitcheann Nàiseanta airson Foghlam tron Ghàidhlig (MCNG).
In total, 4,491 MCNG assessments were completed across Scotland in 2022-23, equivalent to approximately 82.1 per cent of the possible maximum number of assessments available.
In 2022, Tes Scotland revealed the bill for the SNSAs would be £17 million over five years.
How is the data used?
When Nicola Sturgeon announced the government’s intention to introduce standardised assessments, she was clear that it was about tracking performance to “measure progress consistently and drive change”.
However, the results of the SNSAs are not published openly and never have been. Instead, teachers make judgements about whether or not their pupils are hitting the expected level for their age and stage, using the tests to inform that judgement, and this data is published every December in relation to the previous academic year.
This data is referred to as the Achievement of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) Levels data. The latest report can be found .
Some media outlets use the to compile league tables.
The other main purpose of the SNSAs is to provide diagnostic information for teachers, which supports them with the next steps pupils need to take in their learning.
Speaking at an event not long after the SNSAs were launched, a Scottish government official said that the biggest misconception was that they were going to be used to generate “big data for government”. The point of the SNSAs, they said, was to give teachers “information that helps them understand pupil progress and next steps”.
Is the data considered useful?
The latest data published in December 2024 was hailed by the Scottish government as a ””.
However, several months later, at a meeting of the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee in March, where education secretary Jenny Gilruth was giving evidence, Scottish Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Willie Rennie accused the government of “overstating it”.
Although the figures fluctuate from year to year, he pointed out that they were “broadly the same as when we started”.
In terms of the attainment gap in primary, the SNSA data for P1, P4, P7 pupils combined shows the attainment gap in literacy only narrowed by 1.9 percentage points between 2016-17 and 2023-24. In numeracy, it narrowed by 0.2 percentage points over the same period.
In its 2021 report on the implementation of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) picked up on this and said the tests should be replaced with a sample survey.
It stated: “While this data is interesting, reporting it on a national scale and tracking small changes in percentages as evidence of improvement or otherwise may not be giving the system the robust data needed to monitor student achievement.”
The OECD report recommended that Scotland “redevelop a sample-based evaluation system to collect robust and reliable data necessary to support curriculum reviews and decision making”.
How do teachers feel about the tests?
There has long been objection to testing pupils in P1, with MSPs voting to “halt” the tests for this age group in September 2018 after teachers reported the SNSA process was upsetting the youngest pupils.
Later that year, Fife Council decided to scrap the SNSAs for P1 pupils.
In more recent times, as the tests have bedded in, concerns have been less about whether the process is upsetting for pupils and more about whether it is worthwhile.
In 2023, Tes Scotland reported on a survey of over 1,000 primary school leaders, which found almost 60 per cent agreed that SNSAs were generally useful, but that figure dropped to 28.9 per cent when it came to the testing of P1s.
The primary school leaders said that at this age and stage, testing was “time consuming and onerous” and interfered with play-based approaches.
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