Keir Bloomer, the chair of the Commission on School Reform, said the latest literacy results, published last week, showed something was “seriously wrong” with children’s reading and writing skills.
Less than half (49 per cent) of Scotland’s 13 and 14-year-olds are performing well in writing, according to the latest results of the Scottish Survey on Literacy and Numeracy (SSLN), a decline of 15 percentage points on 2012.
In future, data on literacy and numeracy will come via national standardised testing that is being introduced in primary and secondary schools and will be supported by teacher judgements.
The government has insisted the new measure will give more information than before but political opponents have decried the latest results as an indictment of SNP policy.
“The disturbing feature of the results over the years is that overall performance in each survey has been poorer than in the previous survey,” Mr Bloomer said.
“Thus numeracy standards apparently fell between 2011 and 2013 and again by 2015. The same is true of the three literacy surveys. The 2016 results showed performance in reading and listening and talking holding roughly steady, but standards in writing declining at all stages with a very dramatic drop in secondary 2.”
Another aspect of the findings that would disappoint the Scottish government is that there is no sign of any closing of the gap in performance between disadvantaged and more affluent children, Mr Bloomer continued.
“The government’s two main educational priorities are raising standards for all and closing this gap, but performance in literacy and numeracy is going backwards and the gap is not narrowing.”
By refusing to run the new system in tandem with the SSLN, the government made comparison over time “impossible”, Mr Bloomer added.
Liz Smith MSP, education spokeswoman for the Scottish Conservatives, said: “Keir Bloomer and parents across Scotland are quite right to be completely baffled as to why the SNP has decided to drop this survey at this stage of the development of the Curriculum for Excellence. It has provided excellent data over a sustained period of time. The recent statistics have made difficult reading, but that is no excuse to drop (it).”
Tavish Scott, education spokesman for the Scottish Liberal Democrats, said the government should rethink its decision to scrap the SSLN. “Abolishing them stops one of the few objective methods that tell everyone how education is performing.”
However, a Scottish government spokeswoman said: “We are replacing the SSLN with a collection that will provide more data than ever on children’s progress under Curriculum for Excellence.
“Unlike the SSLN, the new arrangements allow people not just to see the national trends but also how their local schools are performing. And it will give teachers and parents data on the attainment of their own children, something the SSLN survey simply cannot do.”