 I know you understand. I'm now moving straight on to the next item of business, which is a debate on motion 13945 in the name of Liz Smith on primary 1 tests. I can invite those members who wish to speak in the debate to press the request to speak buttons now. I call on Liz Smith to speak to and move the motion please. The Scottish Conservatives are very pleased to bring this debate to Parliament because we believe that it is of crucial educational importance. I'm sure that that view is shared by every political party in the chamber. Indeed, I think that we could all be accused of irresponsibility if we did not both acknowledge and listen to the arguments that are being put to us by many in the world of education. I want to be very upfront about our position on the matter, but, before that, I will comment on one thing. That is to welcome the comments from the Cabinet Secretary for Education at the weekend when he said that he wanted a fact based debate. The comments from the First Minister at last week's First Minister's questions when she said to Willie Rennie that educational concerns about the issue should take precedence over politics. That, Presiding Officer, is what many teachers are hoping for this afternoon, and we intend to examine in detail the educational arguments. Bruce Crawford is aware that 29 councils across Scotland carry out P1 assessments. Will she call for those councils to halt those primary assessments? Or, instead, will she stand accused of breathtaking apocrysiau and do exactly what she just talked about—cheap political point-scoring? I am very aware of exactly what councils are saying just now, and it is in some of these very same councils that teachers are speaking out loud and clear about their concerns. Let me be crystal clear about our position and restate our commitment to rigorous standardised tests in P4, P7 and S3, as a crucial part of improving educational attainment and measuring progress in our schools. I know that some parties disagree with standardised assessments generally, but we support the SNP's arguments about why it is important in educational terms and accountability. John Swinney, in our view, was absolutely right to look at the trends in recent PISA results and the comment in the OACD report of three years ago, both of which were consistent with the 2014 Scottish Survey of Literacy enumeracy in terms of drawing his conclusions. There was undoubtedly a very strong argument to deliver better standardised assessment, and he is, I believe, correct to say that it has been too easy for some schools and local authorities to be less than wholly accountable for their educational performance. It was right to introduce standardisation, which proves that better accountability. Let me be unequivocal. We said in our manifesto in 2016 that primary 1 testing was part of that, and we should not have argued otherwise. However, it is also a matter of public record that, during the intervening two years in Parliament and in the media that we have on several occasions said that we have misgivings about primary 1 tests in a way that we do not have for P4, P7 and S3. Liz Smith has said that the Conservative Party was supportive of P1 assessments in 2016. On 28 August 2018, Liz Smith issued those words. The Scottish Conservatives have never been in favour of formal, standardised national tests in primary 1. Does she recognise why some of us feel that the Conservatives are deceiving us on this issue? Liz Smith, I recognise, Mr Swinney, that we made a mistake about primary 1, but I just say to the SNP that this coming from a party that in two programmes for government, 2016 and 2017, who hammered home that there would be an education reform bill, is a bit rich. Let me come to the evidence, because that is important. I particularly want to speak about the kindergarten model, which is used in many European countries, several of whom, incidentally, do not have children starting formal education until age 7. A model, which was established by Friedrich Frible, is used as the foundation of infant teachers' training in Scotland for a long period of time, a time when Scotland was the envy of the world for what it delivered in primary and secondary education. Just as importantly, that philosophy is wholly in line with the principles of the early years of the curriculum for excellence. Just like the curriculum for excellence, Frible has a holistic view of every child as an individual. He believed that they should be nurtured as part of the family and community, and that success in education came about with strong links between home and school. That infant classroom was based around structured play, on learning through discovery and through the gifts that he described them, whether they were counting blocks, ladderlade, creasonaire rods, coloured balls, sand or clay, whatever materials children used to discover. He did not ask infant teachers to make use of standardised tests or assessments, but instead to be skilled in their own professional judgments, well-informed, daily observation about each child, which would then be discussed with each family. Everything about that observation was done to inform and improve their teaching. He believed that testing at that young age could prove unhelpful, and more importantly, that the quality of the information gained by the child's progress could be gained by more meaningful approaches. I will not at the moment, if you do not mind. In my own teacher training years, I remember exactly this debate taking place among primary teachers. In refining my own thoughts prior to leading this debate, I looked very carefully at the primary one tests. I looked at the curriculum for excellence in terms of its early years, and I also looked at what Scotland has been doing in the past. I have to say that the curriculum for excellence in the early years is relatively free of the controversy that has bedevilled the later stages in which we were laid bare at the education committee this morning. I spoke to a lot of people who had done that for a bowl training to ask whether there were concerns about the fact that the absence of formal testing meant that too many children with problems were not being identified. Only a few said possibly yes, but for the majority they said that their specialist training actually allowed them to pick up problems more quickly. One former teacher, who had been head of an infant department, told me the best way to decide the answer to this whole question about whether or not to test in P1 was to look at the historical trends and standards in middle and primary years. If that frible system had not been delivering, then basic standards in literacy and numeracy would have suffered in P4 and P7, but they did not. Indeed, Scotland had a really strong set of results and an irrespective incidentally of social background. At this stage in today's debate, it is important to recognise that the current concerns about the standardised tests are largely concentrated on the primary one age group. Although some critics, with whom I profoundly disagree, believe that the other standardised tests are wrong, it is primary one on which the focus has fallen, and we should be asking ourselves about why that is. The member is aware that, on 17 September 2017, Justin Greening announced a mandatory test for pre-school children, and that it was a contract placed with NFER on 18 April 2018 to develop a mandatory test for all four-year-olds. Liz Smith. Thank you, Mr Stevenson. Yes, I am aware of that. Well, this same debate is happening in England, and it is happening in Wales, it is happening in many other places. It is not unique to Scotland. So, Presiding Officer, can I just share a few thoughts from a primary teacher who wrote to me earlier this week? She told me that she was worried about this debate in primary one test, and the fact that some politicians may be misrepresenting our position. As an experienced teacher of primary one and primary two, she asked me to look at the debate from the best interests of the child. She said that there have been some very good questions in the new test, but there are others who have undoubtedly created problems, and which, as a result, have been the catalyst for the current complaints. In some of the questions, the language used is not making use of the phonic alphabet, with which children are familiar, and they are using names that are sometimes very hard to read. Some questions are too long, taking up too much time, and there is an overemphasis on data handling within each assessment, for which I cannot really understand the purpose. She went on to say that this had led to much discussion in her staff room, ending up with many teachers feeling that there had been insufficient training about how many teachers would be able to participate in these tests, how to interpret them, and that there was too much pressure to complete the assessments in a hurry, which I do not actually think was the Scottish Government's intention. All of that seems to be very time consuming, and not altogether clear in terms of how they will be used to inform their teaching. It is that point that is very important. Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills I must not accept that the issues that she is recounting from a primary school teacher, which I think are entirely reasonable issues, are issues that should lead us to the conclusion that we should monitor and consider the contents of the assessments, not halt them as her motion puts forward. Liz Smith, we disagree with that, because I think that the time has come because of the evidence that has been piling up over the last two years to call a halt, reconsider the evidence that is very much before us and evaluate what is the best way of progressing primary 1 pupils. Let me come to some of the concerns about other education professionals. The cabinet secretary initially knows that his economic advisers were included in that group. Again, there are mixed views, and it would be wrong to suggest otherwise. However, there is a common theme coming through what they are saying, whether it is Sue Ellis or Lindsay Paterson or Sue Palmer, all of whom I greatly respect in this debate. They have differing views, but in each case they are saying one fundamental point. It is not just in terms of being able to measure outcomes, but any form of assessment or test has to be meaningful, and it has to ensure that all the teachers who are using that test feel entirely comfortable with what it is that they are being asked to do. On that last point, it is very clear to me that many primary 1 teachers do not currently feel at all comfortable, and that is why this debate is so important. When I pressed on some of the concerns about the content of the current P1 test, John Swinney said in August this year that, if we need to look again and reflect on the feedback to make sure that the guidance is appropriate for the process, we will do that to guarantee that young people have the type of educational experience that we want them to have. I believe that that was a recognition that there were some serious issues to be addressed. He knows, I think, that that is what many teachers want him to do. He knows, too, that the evidence provided about the P1 test, including what the rights of parents are to be confused and muddled with the point that was made by Lindsay Paterson in his article last week. The Conservatives have been accused of being interested in nothing other than political opportunism and jumping on a bandwagon. If that were true, it would not be possible to find on the record comment from me and several of my colleagues on several occasions in the course of the last two years questioning the educational value of primary 1 testing. As a party, we continue to have these misgivings. We are listening to what is being said by those who are being asked to deliver the test, and it is why I am proposing this motion, which asks the Scottish Government to stop and think, halt the primary 1 test, so that we can reconsider the facts before us and the whole approach to evaluating pupil progress in primary 1. On that point, I move the motion in my name. I move the amendment in my name. It is important that we make decisions about the future of our children's education. We have available to us dispassionate expert opinion in helping us to make the correct choices. I have to say at the outset of this debate that I have been listening with great care to the words that Liz Smith has shared with us today, and with the degree of respect that Liz Smith knows I have for her, I do not believe that we have had the marshalling of expert opinion in the debate that we have had so far. The Scottish Government, in 2015, invited the OECD to review Scottish education. In that report, Improving Schools in Scotland, the OECD said this. The light sampling of literacy and numeracy at the national level has not provided sufficient evidence for stakeholders to use in their own evaluative activities or for national agencies to identify with confidence the areas of strength. They went on to say that there needs to be a more robust evidence base right across the system, especially about learning outcomes and progress, crucially about progress. That is precisely what the national improvement framework and national standardised assessments seek to do. I will give way to Mr Mundell. Oliver Mundell, I thank the cabinet secretary for giving way. I wonder whether he had time this morning to listen to the comments from Professor Jim Scott, who says that no evidence has been brought forward to support those particular assessments and that we do not know whether they are robust or not. Cabinet secretary? Of course, I have just set out why we need those assessments. The OECD told me that we saw external independent opinion that said that we did not have enough information about learning outcomes and progress, so we have put in place the standardised assessments. How we assess their effectiveness is that we ask our education advisers in education Scotland to ensure that each level of those assessments is compatible with each level of curriculum for excellence, consistent with the benchmarks that have been signed off by the chief inspector of education and the chief examiner to make sure that young people are properly equipped with the ability and the platform to progress in their education system. Before we do anything else, Mr Mundell, you are annoying me by baraking from the effect. If you want to do something, you intervene. Assessment is an essential part of a good education system. It is an integral part of effective teaching and learning. That was the point that was made by the president of the Association of Directors of Education in the letter that she authored with my officials to directors of education, and I quote, "...a key principle of Scotland's education system is that assessment is for learning. Assessment allows teachers to understand children and young people's progress and to plan the next phase of their learning and teaching. Assessment is therefore a key tool to inform teachers' professional judgment of the needs of the children and young people they are teaching." The Scottish Government and the Association of Directors of Education, and I continue to quote, "...therefore see the assessments as an integral part of everyday learning for children and young people in P1, P4, P7 and S3 delivered as part of the education authority's duty to provide education." The professional judgment of teachers—this is a point that Liz Smith made—is that the heart of the framework and the standardised assessments that we have put forward, but the assessments provide a consistent tool to inform those judgments. Teachers have been using assessments for years to confirm their judgment of children's progress. The vast majority, 29 out of 32 local authorities, were using some form of standardised assessment before the national system was introduced. Crucially, the majority were not just assessing P1 children, they were assessing P1 children twice during the year. Ian Gray When he made a statement a couple of weeks ago, I asked Mr Swinney if he knew how many of those local authorities had replaced those previously used diagnostic assessments with the new SNSAs. In some cases, for example, East Renfrewshire is a long-standing, long-established assessment authority. What it wants to do, and I think that that is perfectly reasonable, is to see the consistency between the SNSA and the historic model that it has been using to ensure that it has the consistency and educational information. I think that that is a perfectly reasonable transition point for a local authority to take, but not a long-term point. There is nothing new about assessments for P1 children. Local authorities, led over the years by the SNP, Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberals, have all taken forward such an assessment approach and nobody has objected. There are sound educational reasons for that. The key one being that it is absolutely vital to get as much information as possible on children's achievement as early as possible. Professor Sue Ellis, who was quoted by Liz Smith, said that we know that there is a big difference in children's attainment when they start school and that difference grows and gets wider as children move through the school system, so we need some way of tracking that and checking it. Liz Smith, I thank the cabinet secretary for giving way. In terms of raising standards across the board, which is what we all want to do, what evidence has the cabinet secretary got when he claims international measurements, many of whom are not starting the education tool seven years old? Those countries are doing exceptionally well by educational standards, better than Scotland. Does that not prove a point? I think that the key point goes back to my quote from the OECD at the very beginning of my speech, that essentially we do not have enough information about learning outcomes in progress, and for progress to be measured, we have to have an understanding about whether children are acquiring the skills that we expect them to acquire at the early level, because if they are not, they are at a disadvantage in progressing to the first level, and ultimately that will be compounded and what that will fuel is what we are trying to erode, which is the attainment gap. The assessments are essential because, for the first time, teachers are able to use the assessments specifically designed for and aligned to curriculum for excellence, and what I picked up from teachers around the country—I picked it up for the last two years—is that teachers are not confident under curriculum for excellence in the levels that they should be achieving for their young people. It has been strengthened by the benchmarks that I have put in place, but what the standardised assessments do is provide consistency and compatibility from one authority to another, so that we can be assured wherever a child is walking into a school that the teaching profession is working to the same standard across the country. Of course, arguably— Johann Lamont Clarification. Is the data being collected at a national level? We have been advised that it is not going to be collected at a national level. You now seem to be suggesting that it is necessary for it to be collected at a national level in order to identify standards at a national level. I am saying nothing of the sort. I am saying that individual teachers in working their way through the assessments will have greater clarity about the performance of a young person against the standards across the country—the benchmarks, what we expect out of curriculum for excellence, not the results across the country but the levels that have been achieved by young people across the country. The assessments are high-quality and delivered as part of everyday learning. They provide teachers with a detailed breakdown against core skills, highlighting not only where a child may need additional support to achieve the relevant standards but where a child may be excelling and requiring additional challenge. That is in keeping with the Government's twin aims of closing the gap and raising standards. The assessments, crucially—and that relates to one part of Liz Smith's motion—are designed to fit compatibly with the early level of curriculum for excellence, which is a play-based curriculum. It is therefore only appropriate that a small amount of time—less than an hour in one year on average—is taken to ensure that the play-based learning undertaken by children is equipping them with the core skills that we believe they should acquire by the end of P1. Without that assessment, we run the risk that the needs of children may not be effectively served by our education system in progressing on to the first level of CFE. Administered correctly, a child will take part in the assessment as part of their normal classwork, and the assessment will not feel any different to any other task that a child is asked to do. I have dealt so far with the educational arguments. Let me now turn to some of the political issues at stake here. I acknowledge the long-standing hostility of the Greens and the Liberal Democrats on this question. They are entitled to their view, but I do not share it. I point out to them that they are hostile to all standardised assessments and they are being asked to vote for that in the Conservative motion today. However, I am today appalled at the Conservative party. When the First Minister announced national standardised assessment in September 2015, Ruth Davidson responded in the chamber saying this, I am pleased that our repeated and sustained calls for standardised assessments to be introduced in schools have been heeded. The Conservative manifesto in 2016 said that the Scottish Government should design the new standardised tests at P1, P4, P7 to fit into international methodologies and claimed credit for the introduction of national assessment. This morning, Liz Smith said that the Conservatives had changed their mind on P1 assessment. That was not what she said on 28 August. That day, Liz Smith said this, the Scottish Conservatives have never been in favour of formal standardised national tests in primary 1. That statement is untrue. It demonstrates the deceit at the heart of the Conservative motion today. Last week, the Conservatives were demanding more school data. This week, they want less. In 2016, the Conservatives supported P1 assessment. Today, they do not. There is only one conclusion to draw. The Conservatives are playing politics with the education of our children, and we will not play along with them. I have given a little extra time, which Liz Smith could have had, because we had some time in hand and there was a lot of intervention. If anyone is wondering why the time has been like that, it is to take account of interventions. Iain Gray, please, Mr Gray. Let me begin by being clear that we on this side of the chamber have no problem with teachers assessing pupils' learning. Teachers assess pupils' learning every day using a whole variety of techniques and diagnostic methodologies, but above all, by deploying their professional expertise to do so. Secondly, we have no problem with the monitoring of literacy and numeracy standards in our schools. In fact, we encourage it, and not just nationally either. We would like to see Scotland re-enter the Timbs and Pearls international comparisons, which we found out last week. We are dynched for no good educational reason, but just to save money. However, we have a problem with leak tables and high-states testing. That is why, in government, we got rid of it in 2003 and replaced it with the Literacy and Numeracy Survey, which did the job well in a statistically rigorous way, accepted by teachers, educationalists and parents alike, and which the Scottish Government did not improve, as the OECD suggested, but rather abolished. No, our problem is with the Scottish Government's national standardised tests, because they purport to do both of those things, to inform individual learning and to monitor national standards at the same time with the same tests. James Maxden, on the side of politics. John Swinney. I am grateful to Mr Gray for giving me wing. He says that we essentially use the standardised assessments to judge performance across the country. That is not the case. What we use is the information from teacher professional judgment about the achievement of levels by individual pupils. That is what is undertaken. We must agree, except from me, that the surveys that he cites do not give us an insight into individual weakness within the system, where, if we want to improve outcomes for young people, we need to have that data available to us. The survey certainly is not a diagnostic learning tool and never claimed to be. It is a summative survey tool. Let me go into a little detail later on about exactly that. James Maxden once said of politics that if you cannot ride two horses at once, you should not be in the circus. However, Mr Swinney has failed to ride the two horses of individual diagnostic and national standards testing at once. That has resulted in the current mess. Some first-school moments, such as when Mr Swinney's press release tells us that those tests are not tests and we should stop calling them tests. On the very day, his department released an evaluation of them calling them tests, or telling parents who asked if they were compulsory that they are not compulsory but that those parents have no right to refuse to allow their child to do them. That is a riddle, not an answer. Or yesterday's desperation of Scottish Government officials putting MSPs and journalists through illiteracy and numeracy tests for five-year-olds as if that would prove anything. Mr Swinney has told Parliament clearly that those are diagnostic assessments to support learning and teaching. Data will not be published or used for accountability, but the First Minister says something different. She says that, as a result of the introduction of standardised assessment and the new way that we are monitoring performance, instead of the previous Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy data, we will now have data on every pupil in the country that will allow us to determine progress in reducing the attainment gap. The First Minister thinks that those are statistically valid results to monitor progress nationally, while the Deputy First Minister swears to us that they are not. The truth is that the Government has managed to introduce assessments that feel like high-stakes tests to teachers and pupils but do not produce statistically valid comparative measurements and diagnostic tests that teachers tell us that they do not trust to diagnose and have not replaced those assessments that they were using previously. The Deputy First Minister says that those are not summative assessments against benchmarks with a pass-fail, but what we were shown yesterday was the teacher's sheet for each pupil, which is a list of curriculum for excellence benchmarks with a ticker across against each one according to whether it was passed or failed, and then with the pupil placed against a national norm. We were shown results being collated at class, school and local authority level. That looks like summative norm reference testing to me, but, to be honest, what I think of the assessments is not important. What matters is what teachers think of them. Those views are very clear, not least from the EIS, which, only a few weeks ago, I quote... John Swinney. I am grateful to Mr Gray for giving me. I acknowledge that there are many teachers that do not like the standardised assessments. There are equally many other teachers that do, and the issue was illustrated to me this morning at the Scottish Learning Festival, where I was open to questions from a huge audience of teachers and, in the first group of questions, one teacher made the case for and one teacher made the case against. There are different opinions. What is important is that we have to be equipped with the diagnostic ability to support young people, and that is why we have those assessments. Ian Gray No, Mr Swinney. What is important is that, when an educational reform is built in, the evidence and the consensus and support of it is built first, before it is introduced, and not after. The EIS, which represents teachers only a couple of weeks ago, reaffirmed its serious concerns over the educational values of the national standardised assessments. They wrote to every member of this Parliament to do it. One teacher summed it up to me by saying, I cannot use the data from these tests to support my teaching in any way, and that teacher's view was repeated to Mr Swinney this morning at that very learning festival, was it not? Those problems and flaws apply to the whole of the Scottish national standardised assessments, but, more than anywhere, they apply in P1. There are a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, because there are many stories of four and five-year-olds upset, even to the point of tears, by questions that they find incomprehensible or confusing and computer skills that they are required and find daunting. Secondly, that is meant that, in primary one, far from those assessments being an integral part of everyday teaching, teachers tell us that they have lost 30, 40 or even 50 hours of valuable teaching time for each of the literacy and numeracy tests. Thirdly, and above all, as Liz Smith said, because of the growing evidence that, at this early age, play-based learning is the most appropriate and effective approach to education in general and closing the attainment gap in particular. The Deputy First Minister has protested in the past and said again today that, in P1, we do have a play-based curriculum, but the experts tell us that we cannot have that and the minister's standardised tests. They are not compatible. Even if the Government assists on persisting with those tests further up the school while they try to sort out what they are really supposed to be, at the very least, at the very minimum, surely they must listen to the teachers whose professional expertise Mr Swinney claims to hold in high regard and scrap the test in primary one. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I am glad that we have the opportunity this afternoon to debate the issue of standardised assessments after weeks of this debate taking place between those of us who speak on education issues but outside of the Parliament. As the Deputy First Minister made clear, the Scottish Greens have long been clear that we oppose this policy. What he was not correct to say though was that, in supporting the motion put down in Liz Smith's name, we support standardised assessments. You will not find that phrase in the motion. I will read the first phrase of it, that the Parliament believes that good quality pupil assessment is an essential component of the drive to raise educational standards in Scotland schools. We agree that we do not believe that that assessment should take place through those formalised standard assessments. There is no contradiction there, and I will explain why as I go through this. There has been much talk of manifestos. In our 2016 manifesto, a fine read that I would recommend to the Government, we unequivocally opposed the return of standardised assessments, and not just for four and five-year-olds. We welcomed the parliamentary majority that is now formed around that position in regard to the P1 assessment specifically. The Scottish Government has been keen, including in this debate, to say that the policy is evidence-based, but it is international best practice and evidence that led the Greens to oppose standardised testing in the first place. To tick off one particular cliche of education debates, Finland is one of the undisputed success stories of education reform, turning from mediocre at best in the 80s to a model of excellence from the early 2000s onwards. While there are a range of factors contributing to their success, war levels of inequality and poverty being the most obvious, they have supported that success in education. Their approach to standardised tests are part of that story, that success story. Finnish education was reformed to allow teachers the freedom to assist pupils based on their own best judgment. Standardised testing was dropped and replaced with an emphasis on continuous and formal assessment of the individual needs of each pupil. Our education committee visited Finland earlier this year. During that visit, I think that we were all struck by the culture of trust within their system, particularly trust in classroom teachers, to, with proper resourcing, support and training, come to their own judgments about their own pupils. That is what we need in Scotland, particularly for children with additional support needs, for whom the test caused even more unnecessary anxiety. Well-trained teachers and well-staffed schools are what we need to ensure that every additional need is identified and supported. That means reversing the cuts that have seen educational psychologists and the grant associated with studying that course disappear. The reason that Finland took the approach that it has is that, while some standardised assessments may provide some data that can be useful—a criticism that has been levied against those assessments, of course, as they do not provide that—the very presence of the test and the impact that it has on pupil experience and teaching is a net negative. Pupils often react badly to the tests. Some experience anxiety and fear in others that elicits boredom. We knew that already. There were warnings from the Scottish Government's own international advisers before the policy was introduced. Professor Andy Hargreaves, a member of the Government's international council of education experts, highlighted the fear and anxiety that standardised tests cause for pupils. Other academics, the EIS and the experience of individual teachers and pupils have all confirmed that. We have all heard the reports of young children being reduced to the point of, in some cases, tears and experiencing huge anxiety over those tests. Teachers are also pressured, whether they are intentional or not, to teach to the test. The focus becomes hitting some predefined metric, as Ian Gray explained, regardless of its suitability to the pupil that they know and that they know best. Their professional judgment of individual pupils—one of the principles under Pilling Curriculum for Excellence, when we all agree on—is undermined by this policy. The Deputy First Minister can give all the assurances that he likes on how standardised tests will be used, but the very presence of the assessment creates the pressure to teach to that rather than to emphasise the needs of the individual pupil themselves. Teachers are concerned that the results of assessments far beyond the primary 1 level will be used by senior management and others to form a judgment on their professional ability, because the data can be aggregated to a class level. That is what creates the pressure to teach to the test. There are also well-grounded fears that, although there is no intention, for now, to return to league tables, that this sets the groundwork for future league tables and the informal tables may begin to emerge. The presence of standardised tests pushes education to become target driven at a level that is abstracted from the needs of individual pupils. That cuts straight to the heart of what we want Scottish education to be. Do we want a culture of repeated formal assessments and pressure heaped on pupils throughout their entire school life? Or a culture of tailored support that recognises the individual capability of students and relies on teachers' professional judgment to foster their learning as curriculum for excellence intends? What I find particularly frustrating about the introduction of those standardised tests is all the issues that I have highlighted were already well known. As mentioned, members of the Government's own international council of experts have been at the forefront of some of those criticisms. I appreciate that there are some experts, including on the Government's council, who support approaches of standardised assessments. The Government has already drawn attention to a number of them. I respect their views and I do not doubt for a second their expertise in that field. However, the question must be asked why is the Government ignoring the other assembled experts? Why is it ignoring the voices of teachers, of pupils? Why is it ignoring those in Scottish education who are saying that there is a problem? Just this morning, our education committee heard from Professor Jim Scott, Oliver Mundell, who has already mentioned it, who has said that he has not seen sufficient evidence that those assessments are beneficial. He has also heard from Dr Alan Britton who has said that he has not seen evidence of consultation and consensus building on that policy. That is a polite understatement, if I have ever heard one. Teachers, parents and education charities have all raised concerns and called for the P1 test to be scrapped. After today's debate, a majority of this Parliament can be added to that ever-growing list of those calling for a rethink. Many of us have concerns far beyond primary 1 assessments. That is what the debate is focused on. I urge the Deputy First Minister to walk back his previously stated intentions to ignore the will of this Parliament. After the shambles of his education bill, which he will now attempt to force through the majority of without parliamentary mandate, Mr Swinney is developing a reputation for casting aside the views of elected members, as well as those of experts, teachers, parents and pupils. That is no way to build a successful system of education. It is certainly not building a consensus. It will result in the opposite of Finland's culture of trust. Today, we will give him an opportunity to take a different tact. For the sake of teachers and pupils who are currently experiencing this failed policy, I really do hope that he will listen. I thank Liz Smith for bringing forward the debate today. Indeed, the Scottish Government had been so sure of its grounds that it could have brought forward the debate at any point in the past number of weeks. In fairness, Mr Swinney would not have had to miss the learning festival this afternoon. We might want to reflect on the benefits of leading the debate, where it is so confident of the arguments that it wants to make. A retired Edinburgh teacher now provides support to local schools here in the capital, paid for through the Government's attainment fund. In the last year, she has spent more time helping five-year-old girls and boys to sit their primary one test than on the job that she was employed by the City Council to do. On Monday, I sat down with local primary one teachers at home, and they showed me the reality of those tests for five-year-olds. I completely concur with Ian Gray's assessment of what data is produced, the children, the names, the numbering, the questions, the ticks or crosses and the data that can be produced from that. The simple message from those teachers is that they learn nothing about pupils that they do not already know. As others have mentioned already this afternoon, two eminent educational researchers told Parliament's education committee today that they did not recognise evidence nor consultation nor any consensus building for primary one testing. Nor, they pointed out, had the Government followed a reasonable principle and piloted such an initiative to judge its effectiveness. The principle that I share with most teachers and parents is that four- and five-year-old girls and boys should encounter a play-based approach to the start of school, curriculum for excellence early level for three to six-year-olds, stresses exploration and play, yet teachers explain that primary one tests, skew learning away from play. I therefore do not recognise or agree with Deputy First Minister an interpretation of that in his remarks earlier on. There is a wider debate too about why Scotland persists with the age of five being the formal start to education. Many countries around the world, 88 per cent indeed structure a play-based nursery or preschool curriculum through to six years old. Some countries start formal education at seven. John Mason Is his argument that, given that we are emphasising play, that play itself should not be assessed? Mr Mason would do well to read the curriculum for excellence guidelines in the three to six-year-old programme and he would understand the answer to that question before he needed to ask it. Teachers assess, nursery teachers assess all the time. That is the point of this and I do not understand frankly why members on those benches do not get that point. What is the reality of testing? Rather than a civil service tutorial yesterday, I have listened and I am sure that I am not the only Opposition member. I have listened not just in this past week but for weeks and weeks over months to primary one teachers and school management teams about the reality of testing. There is a balance to the argument. The former standardised assessment was for some teachers a genuine diagnosis, but teachers have graphically explained that what went before is quite different from the new national standardised tests now in classrooms and to suggest otherwise is simply misleading. The parents group upstart also contends that local authority baseline testing is partly responsible for the lack of play-based teaching in many schools. The structure of those tests, to assume five-year-old girls and boys, can read, use a mouse, have an attention span that will last the length of the test and will not simply guess the answer, wrong on all counts, as many teachers observe. The Scottish Government has repeatedly claimed, indeed the Deputy First Minister did so again today, that the test takes less than an hour per pupil. Indeed, I think I heard the First Minister say that it was an average of 20 minutes. I can find no teacher who confirms that fact. In a class of 21 primary 1 pupils of varying abilities, the average time that I understand is an hour per pupil, not 30 minutes, not under an hour, but an hour. John Swinney Mr Scott is quite right to press on evidence, and the Government has either answered or is about to answer FOI requests that demonstrate the data that is available that shows that the average time for a P1 assessment in numeracy is 22 minutes and in literacy it is 27 minutes. That is across, in excess of 100,000 individual assessments, and that information is in the public domain. Tavish Scott We will see. I think that all of us will cast a close eye on that. Average, I think, was the word used, but we will be very happy to look at the evidence on that. All I am saying to Mr Swinney is that I have plenty of teachers, not just in Shetland, but all over the country, who, time and time, tell me again that it takes more than an hour per pupil. He is the point. It is not just the time that it takes for the pupil, it is the time that the teacher takes out of the classroom when he or she could be teaching the other pupils in her class. I think that that is the important point that the minister gave no recognition for in his remarks earlier today. Time that the teacher could be spending with 21 other pupils, as opposed to taking the individual pupil bit by bit through that test, 22 minutes, 27 minutes or an hour, come at what it is that is time not spent in the classroom. It is wrong, therefore, to underestimate and, I believe, disparage the evidence of class teachers everywhere that the time taken on primary 1 tests is time lost to teaching and, therefore, to the educational advancement of those five-year-olds. Testing five-year-olds also is particularly demanding on teachers in composite classes, many parts of Scotland, a fact that simply has not been recognised as yet by the Government. There are sensible educational arguments why this P1 testing regime is not appropriate and should be stopped. The principle of the argument does not support testing five-year-olds anyway, but the practical case against testing five-year-olds is overwhelming. I would have lost to understand why the Government is deaf to the practical observations of teachers and parents. The language ministers have used to suggest that anyone who even considers that P1 testing is wrong has been extraordinarily aggressive. Many teachers have asked me why that is the case. There are sensible educational alternatives that help primary 1 teacher judgment in the constant evaluation of their class. Why, for example, do ministers instead listen carefully to teachers using the Northern Alliance literacy programme? It is constructive and it is helpful. It helps teachers with their pupils. As one teacher put it to me the other day, why does the Government not embrace and support the things that work and help us rather than imposing tests on us that do not tell us anything about our class that we do not already know? What is the Government's case for testing five-year-olds girls and boys? Is it about the data that they want? One of Mr Swinney's officials has helped to explain today that how school league tables could be calculated using the data from those tests. Mr Swinney has been much of that today. It looks to me like there is a mawseless direction of travel. Tests are not appropriate for primary 1 girls and boys. The Government should accept that and should accept the will of this Parliament. We now move to the open debate. Speech is of six minutes, please, and time is quite tight. I have muddle phrases followed by Clare Adamson. I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this debate on P1 testing. I do that from the perspective of someone who has two children in primary school today and someone who is also married to a primary school teacher. What happens in our primary schools is of keen personal interest to me. It is all obviously being of wider political importance. The starting point for the debate is to make it clear that we on this side of the chamber do support standardised assessments as a matter of principle, as Liz Smith set out. I know that there are other parties who take a different view and we have already heard from them this afternoon, but our position is that there is great value in standard assessments further up the school. Those assessments can be of value to individual teachers, they can help parents in understanding what stage their children are at, and, equally importantly, they can give an overall picture of performance across the whole country. We have heard the cabinet secretary set out why he believes standardised assessment is important. I have sympathy for his argument and agreed with a lot of the points that he made. However, that does fly in the face of decisions that were taken by him and his predecessors in office in order to reduce the amount of information that was available. The Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy was scrapped. Scotland was removed by Mr Swinney's predecessor in office from the international TIM study, which is trends in international mathematics and science study, and Perl's progress in international reading literacy study, which provided an important comparison with other countries. If the Government is going to make an argument today about the value of assessment, it needs to be consistent in its approach, whereas it has been completely contradictory to what is done in the past. However, the debate is not about standard assessments in itself. It is focused instead entirely on this one question. Are standard assessments appropriate at primary one level? Here is where we depart from the cabinet secretary. The evidence that we have heard from those who are involved in education, and particularly from teachers in the front line, is that there are real issues with the standard assessments for primary one as they exist. We know that the EIS opposes those tests. We have heard, quoted already in this debate this afternoon, evidence about the views of various teachers and head teachers expressing concern about the impact that those assessments have. We have also heard the views of many parents deeply concerned about those tests, to the extent that many are looking to actively remove their children from the system rather than face testing. Unless, as a set-out in some detail, her concerns are with the inappropriateness of this form of testing at P1 level. I cannot see why testing like this is necessary. Any primary one teacher worth their salt will, within a few weeks, if not indeed days, of new pupils starting in school have a very strong grasp on their individual abilities. It is precisely because we have well trained and committed primary one teachers that we should have confidence that they are picking up those children who are doing well, those children who are struggling and those who will need additional support. It is very difficult to see what a standardised test as it is being set out will bring in terms of improving the information that is available to a good primary one teacher, because, in fact, primary one teachers should know that already. The reality is that, if those tests are already proving controversial, if they are already proving unpopular with parents, as is the case, what we are going to have is a situation in which large numbers of parents effectively boycott those tests by removing their children from the system, as they are entitled to do. The value in those tests disappears altogether if there is not a large majority of parents and pupils participating. The policy objective is defeated because parents vote with their feet. In approaching this issue, the Scottish Conservatives believe that we should listen to the evidence. My colleague Liz Smith said earlier that we did say in 2016 that we would support P1 tests, and we now accept that that was wrong. We have listened to the evidence and we have changed our minds. We realised that we got that wrong. In the same way that we heard from the cabinet secretary for more than a year about how vital his new education bill was going to be, the First Minister even told this Parliament last year, and I quote, a new education bill will deliver the biggest and most radical change to how our schools are run that we have seen in the lifetime of devolution. Yet, one year later, it has been announced that this bill will be abandoned. What the cabinet secretary seems to be telling us is that it is all right for him to change his mind about the way forward, but when other parties change their mind, they are not permitted to do so. That seems to be an extraordinary set of double standards even for this Government. The cabinet secretary went further, because he used extraordinary language this afternoon. He accused the Conservatives of deceit because we changed our mind. He should be apologised for that remark. John Swinney I did not accuse the Conservatives of deceit for changing their mind. I accused the Conservatives of deceit because Liz Smith said that on 28 August, the Scottish Conservatives had never been in favour of formal, standardised national tests. Murdo Fraser in his hysterical speech has just confirmed that very point. Murdo Fraser You know when Mr Swinney is in trouble, he resorts to the language that we have heard this afternoon. You see, he is allowed to change his mind, but when other people change their mind, they are accused of playing politics. They know that they are on the run. Can we please settle down on that issue? Can we please settle down? That was just getting ridiculous on both sides of the chamber, and can you please close fairly quickly? I will. Can I just say this? It is actually much in the SNP's approach to education we support. Many of their ideas about improving school autonomy, empowering headteachers or putting a renewed focus on literacy and numeracy are the ideas that we have championed for years. In our approach for education, we can hardly be accused of putting politics before the interests of young people, because our track record speaks for itself. The vote today is not a vote about party politics, as the cabinet secretary would claim. It is a vote about what is best for our pupils and what is in the interests of parents. That is a vote not to have sanitised testing at primary 1, because the evidence tells us that it is not in the best interests of our children. For that reason, I support the motion in Liz Smith's name. I now call Claire Adamson to be followed by Jenny Gilruth. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I have listened with interest across the chamber this afternoon. I hope that I will get some enlightenment as to the positions of the parties on national testing. I am afraid that I remain as confused as I was before I came to the chamber this afternoon. A bit of reflection on my own experience, my son went through 5 to 14 curriculum. I was provided with report cards for him every year, and it would say that he was working towards a particular level at 5 to 14, including at primary school, when he was working towards level B. What that told me was that he was working at the appropriate level, but also that he had been assessed by the teacher formally as part of that process for that, and that was happening from primary 1. I then discovered that there were other testings going on of pupils across North Lanarkshire at that time. I had never heard of them before, the cat testing, and my son was undergoing. I talked about parents voting with their feet. I wish I had had that option, because I knew nothing about that. It was hidden to parents that we were not given any information about when that was happening. We were not given any information about the results of that testing. It was completely a black box in education. Having done my own research on it, I decided, as a parent, that I listened to the arguments for the assessments and realised that they were probably to my son's benefit. I made that decision, but that was not apparent to most parents. What we have now is a system that parents know exactly what is happening in their schools. They can get the results, and they can see an assessment of how their child is doing. That is much, much more transparent than what was happening before. I am sorry, Mr Gray, but I do not have enough time. The other thing that concerned me as a parent was the cost of those tests. It has been mentioned today that, somehow uniquely, the tests that have been brought forward by this Government cause extreme stress, extra time and resources for the classrooms. It has taken up all this time. There has been no assessment of what happened before with other testing that was going on. I am in the dark about that. No, I will not be taking an intervention, thank you. When looking at that, I remembered that there had been some work done on the costs of national testing. In June 2005, the Times Educational Supplement Scotland had done a survey of local authorities. 32 local authorities had found that the standardised testing was costing councils over £1 million a year. The cost of the Scottish bus was likely to be higher because, indeed, in Frees, Galloway, Clackmannish and Sterling had not responded to those FOI requests. Other local authorities, including Glasgow and Perth and King Ross, did not disclose their cost because they carried out testing on a school by school basis. Did that come out of the school budget? Did it come out of the education burden of the local authority? I am none the wiser. The test also showed that it was on the increase. North Asia has been looking for an authority-wide approach in order to inform their assessment of how their learning and teaching was happening in that local authority. Of course, that was a Labour-controlled local authority, and it would carry out assessments in P1, P3, P7, P7, P5, P7 and S2. It was a Labour-controlled authority, but it would come today and say that it did not agree with primary 1 testing. Edinburgh City Council was the biggest spender on standardised testing, paying out £136,000 a year on literacy and numery tests. They used GL assessment tests and a known P1 baseline assessment to examine pupils' literacy. Again, a Labour council in coalition used P1 tests. At that time, Lindsay Paterson commented on some of the issues around testing. He said that the testing—what the survey showed from test was that testing was not alien to the culture of Scottish teaching or the Scottish teaching profession. Instead of buying in from the likes of Durham University and from external organisations, tests without benchmarking across local authorities or across Scotland, we now have a standardised test that can be used by everyone and across Scotland as a whole. I can point to some of the councils that we are doing this at. As I said, Labour in coalition primary 1 testing, West Lothian, was spending £100,000 a year. Again, primary 1 testing, Labour-led council, Aberdeenshire was spending £98,000 a year, a Conservative and Llymdeb coalition, Aberdeen City was using £95,000 in tests, again a Labour and Conservative coalition, yet the Conservatives are coming here today and saying that they do not believe in primary 1 testing. Island Opposition parties are completely unaware of what the road administrations and local authorities are doing in their classrooms, or that they have come here only to have what the first minister described as political opportunism. I do not find either of those positions particularly edifying, Presiding Officer. I do not think that it serves the young people of Scotland to be having this debate in this context when this has been a standard practice. If there are improvements to be made, let's make them, but to have a fundamental position against primary 1 teaching when that has been going on in our schools, we should be looking to improvement and to be looking to what the benefits are for our young people and not just taking a political stand to serve some purpose against the Government, because it does not do the young people of Scotland any good and it does not do this Parliament any good. Jenny Gilruth, to be followed by Joanne Lamont. It's just like being back in the classroom this afternoon. Today's motion states, good quality pupil assessment is an essential component of the drive to raise educational standards in Scotland's schools. I would like to begin with a note of consensus, because the exhausting stalemates of political debate surrounding Scottish education need it, because our teachers deserve it and because for our pupils it is imperative that every political party focuses on the practicalities of closing the poverty-related attainment gap. Perhaps Professor Lindsay Patterson put it best last week when he said, the simple fact, as unpalatable as that might be for many politicians in teaching unions, is that education cannot do without tests. Only reliable data from scientifically standardised tests can enable us to learn from both the failures and the successes. Assessments, call it what you will, are not new. In the senior phase of our curriculum, we expect people to be ready to sit final examinations at national 5 higher and advanced higher level respectively. Assessment, I'd like to make some progress. Assessment is a golden thread running through our education system. As a child progresses, their teacher assesses their progress and our teachers have always been entrusted to do that. In Fife, that has been completed in our primary schools historically through assessment is for excellence, which is developed by Durham University. Across the country, as my colleague Bruce Crawford alluded to, 29 out of 32 local authorities used some form of standardised assessment to benchmark pupil progress, so we know that that is not something new. Under assessment under curriculum for excellence, however, a change in its very nature, and what might have been an end-of-unit test in S4, became an outcome in assessment standard, which pupils had to overcome in order to gain unit passes and therefore to be presented for the final examination. If a pupil did not pass these units, and an added value unit, or a national 4 or an assignment at national 5, then they could not gain full course award. In some circumstances, they would not be permitted to sit the final examination. The education secretary was therefore right to remove this unnecessary administrative burden, which meant that faculty heads, like me, were responsible for a number of different subject areas, would be sitting in school until late into the evenings simply to input data for the SQA's benefit. That, for me, is the issue with today's debate, because it has taken primary 1 assessment as a narrow indicator, as something that can be detached from a child's wider educational journey. I would therefore ask that the Government give consideration to how standardised assessment data correlates and communicates with the managing information system, or CMIS, as it is known, which is used by most secondary schools to track pupil progress. Presiding Officer, I doubt that there is a single member of the Scottish Parliament who has not sat a test in their lives. They are integral features of a modern education system. Indeed, on the education committee, I am glad to be in the company of two former teachers, and across the chamber I count at least five others in total. However, I think that I am correct in asserting that I am the only former teacher with experience of actually delivering curriculum for excellence and of the many challenges and opportunities that that system can present. What existed prior to standardised assessments was, of course, the much lauded by the Opposition Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy. As a faculty head, the data was never shared with me. As a classroom teacher, I had random groups of pupils removed from my classes and then returned during the course of a lesson. However, as a Secondia Education Scotland, I learned the most about what SSLN meant, administration running about providing data to the Government of the day. That has to be the key difference with standardised assessments. At yesterday's briefing with Scottish Government officials, it was explained to all members who attended that data generated by those assessments is then provided to the teacher to track pupil progress accordingly. That data is going to mean something to teachers. I would like to make progress. Notwithstanding, I do think that there have been legitimate concerns raised regarding how standardised assessments will be administered. I have consistently raised poor ICT provision in our schools as an issue for my own experience. A primary teacher I know told me of having to sit one to one with one of her pupils to administer those assessments. Why? Because there was no wi-fi connectivity. Yesterday, my surface decided to give up the ghost while preparing my speech for today. In minutes, a member of the Parliament's ICT team was in my office and within the hour I had a new one. That does not happen in our schools. Wi-fi is often disparate technology, provision and patchy. We must therefore support our teachers in making those assessments work, and that means that local authorities need to ensure that they resource our schools on an equal basis. Last Thursday, I watched a class of school children look on as the leader of the Opposition Party berated the educational system in which they are currently learning. I watched her pivot a question on standardised assessments to the role of parents in directing school education. I watched her hype up a narrative that has again been perpetuated today to suggest that Scottish education is failing. Today's motion appears to be much of a confused muchness when it comes to the Tories on education. We know that they are back-standardised assessments in 2016, but today's motion pivots play-based learning, and I have to wonder if any of them have actually been in a primary school recently. Or are they seriously suggesting that we allow pupils up until the end of SD to play in sandpits and paint pictures with their hands? To conclude, I hope that every member will reflect upon the purpose of assessment today. We all sat some form of assessment to get here, and if we are to have an education system that provides an equal chance for every pupil to succeed, we must empower our teachers to make the necessary interventions that will do just that. I call Johann Lamont to be followed by James Dornan. Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. I welcome the opportunity to participate in this debate, although it does not feel particularly if it is a debate at this stage. I hope that, at later stage, people will be willing to take interventions. In opening, I express my concern at the way in which those who defend the Scottish Government position have dismissed the issue by suggesting that it is all got up by those who are motivated by opposition to the SNP. We ought not to judge others by your own standards. It is, of course—to take this line is a well-known tactic—to impun the motives of those raising concerns, for then you do not need to address the concerns themselves. In doing so, members have shown great disrespect for those parents, teachers, educationalists, childcare workers and others who have had the temerity to suggest that the Scottish Government approach is seriously flawed. I suspect that many of those people, including primary school teachers, have been in a primary school in the past week or so. I say to John Swinney that it is the oddest of a tax that I have heard him make that his criticism of the Tories is that they are simply not being Tory enough. I also express concern at the attempts to characterise the debate as between those who care and who want to bring the rigor through rigor at standardised testing and a teaching profession that does not care and simply resists change whatever that change may be. All my teaching career, I was driven by a passion and desire to see rigor in the system, a rigor that ensured that children wherever they were born and whatever their circumstances could achieve their potential. I always believed that the education system should raise ambition and expectation, not shrug a child's life's chances away on the basis of where they were born, and that is the test that I apply to this policy. Will it improve those chances? I do not believe it will. I say this to the cabinet secretary. Teachers who pose this testing do so not because they do not care but precisely because they do care. Teachers want real change in the lives of young people, not something that creates a business in the system but with no evident benefits. To the test itself, I attended the demonstration that was called yesterday. That raised a whole series of questions for me. The assessment can be taken at any time over primary 1, so children could be doing the test at any time between the age of four and a half and over six. There was no clarity on the level of support a child could get to complete the assessment. A teacher might help them, additional support teacher might help them, indeed a buddy from primary seven might help them, but there was going to be no consistency suggested on that regard. Pupils were to get loads of practice ahead of the assessment so that they understood what the questions might involve. It was clear, despite claims to the contrary, that the assessment is not consistent and cannot be used as a survey of national trends in literacy and numeracy, and it is not just part of the normal learning experience. In truth, it disrupts that experience. However, as Iain Gray said, our short experience of a rather symbolic lunchtime presentation is not what is relevant. What do teachers, what do families tell us? Teachers tell us that it takes up teacher time and takes time away from learning. It is taking classroom support from individual pupils who need it to manage the class while the tests are being run. The information that the test provides is less useful to them than the assessments that they make. There is huge effort but too little or no purpose. It is no wonder that those who are in the front line of supporting our young people are so frustrated at the approach of the Scottish Government. It is hard to assess the opportunity costs of that focus. Not only does it not support learning, it compounds the pressure already on teachers and support staff. Even if the assessment produces a diagnosis, a diagnosis that most teachers will already be able to make for themselves, it will not bring with it the help that the diagnosis identifies. Therefore, you fund a test but it will not bring extra learning support to help a child to catch up. It will not bring the educational psychologist to assist more complex needs. It will not bring a homelink's teacher for the wee soul whose family circumstances are denying the child peace to learn. It will not bring the additional support for those with additional support needs who need help to sustain a full day or a full week in school and are currently on part timetables. It will not reduce workload, it will disrupt it further. While you want to do more on testing, Mr Swinney, you are reducing the support that staff and teachers have in their classroom every day. That is the nub of it. Standardised assessment is not a policy that is developed over time and building consensus around its worth. It started as a line to take when government was under pressure on its record in education. The problem for the cabinet secretary is that, in seeking to answer the question on how to improve Scottish education, he does not follow basic good practice, so revered in the education system itself. Look at the question, study the evidence, draw conclusions and then outline action. Do not start at the conclusion and then work your way back to find a way of justifying it. That is poor practice in education and it is even poorer practice when its consequences are so significant for the education of our children. It is time for the cabinet secretary to stop the defence that he has deployed so far, that he is the only one who cares. It is time for him to step back, not to dig in. Listen, build consensus, change his approach and ensure that our young people are at the centre of this process and that none of them are denied the opportunity to a proper education. James Dornan, followed by Alison Harris. If we want to get it right for every child, we must ensure that we catch each individual at least by the time that they reach their first moments of education. As a constituency MSP, I deal with many inquiries about education, provision and outcomes. Often parents tell me stories about their children's abilities and trials. When they have identified the difficulty of their child's ability to learn, they frequently tell me that they wish it had been picked up earlier in order for that child to have received the support necessary to enable them to reach their own unique potential. I have never met a parent who has complained about any early intervention when it comes to supporting a child's educational needs. Parents recognise that the earlier a problem or indeed a talent is identified, the more support and educational nurturing that young person can receive. Education does not just start in primary 7 or at that 5 level, or even when young people are sitting higher. A good education starts with a firm foundation from the very day that our children cross a school door and before. The standard eye testing is not a mark of the educational destination that a child will arrive at in the future. It is merely a process in which education providers can gather the appropriate information and data to ensure that no child is missed out or left behind. Teachers need a benchmark to gauge their abilities and attributes that each child has or needs in order to succeed. It is important to acknowledge that those assessments form only part of the picture when it comes to the progress of a child's development. I am interested to know whether the member thinks that those tests show what he is saying they do, because many teachers feel that they give a benchmark that they can judge themselves, but it does not tell them anything about the individual's potential. I sat the test today, and I am proud to say that I passed first time. I have seen it. We have a four-year-old in our house regularly, and there are lots of the questions that I think that at the start of that process at that four-year-old—he is not four yet, he is four very soon—that that four-year-old would have been able to do. It is an adaptive test. If that was the limit of how that child could have been—hold on, let me finish answering your question. If that is the limit of what that child could have achieved, that is where the tests would have been and that is what they would have known. However, if the child is doing well, then you can get harder and harder questions until you find a level where the child is at. It is an adaptive test, and it is no way a pressure test. I hear about children crying and doing these tests. Children have always cried at school. Primary school, I remember, hold on a second. I remember the day I started primary school, one girl started crying in the corridor, and the next thing was a corridor full of greeting wanes, because you are young and anything can set you off. Please do not mix the two together with the tears of a child being about to test. No. It is important to acknowledge that those assessments form only a part of the picture. The assessment is no result and is used alongside many other teaching tools to provide a more accurate and complete picture of developmental progress. The Government has always made it very clear that those assessments are a guide to creating a tailored and specific education for each and every child. They are in no way, shape or form a negative tool. Just like I mentioned earlier, they should be used to identify any early intervention that is necessary. I read a brilliant article in the Herald that argued that we should take the politics out of this debate and highlight why it is so important that we look at this debate rationally without engaging in a scaremongering that can be so damaging when parents are already faced with so many difficult choices when it comes to raising children. The discussion around what is best for our children should fundamentally be with their best interest at heart and not use some sort of political football. To be quite honest, that seems like just another Tory in Labour stunt. The Conservative party is known for many things, not many on positive, but at this moment in time, the party mantra seems to be U-turn above all else. We have seen, with all witnesses, a spectacular 180 when it comes to Brexit, but this current change in her party policy is quite something to behold. Not only do standardised testing appear to be a policy that the Tories agreed with, they were for once publicly supportive of this Government's commitment to it. Liz Smith herself released statements to the press criticising previous structures of testing and encouraging the Scottish Government to improve the various assessments in which this motion deems to criticise. It smacks of opportunism and blatant hypocrisy. I think that we have all witnessed the Tory party's ability to use pretty much anything to attack the SNP. However, I am shocked at their willingness to take something as important as a child's education and use it to serve their own personal agenda. When I was convener of education, I worked well with Liz Smith and I have the highest regard for her. I know that she is a genuine interest in the future of children and all our young people. For that reason, I am incredibly surprised by her putting her name to this motion. I would strongly urge her to reconsider her position on this. We should be using this platform in the chamber to draw together when it comes to closing the attainment gap. It has angered me that we are using this valuable time to discuss an issue that has been supported by parties across the chamber. I am sure that Labour and the Lib Dems will be saying where. I was on the television just before I came in here and I was on with a Conservative and a Lib Dem. Both of them are saying that these tests are the worst thing in the world and that they are going to be the ruination of every child. Four councils have got Lib Dems and Conservative coalitions and the four of them are using standardised testing. Four of them are using it beforehand and four of them are using it now. We have the Labour Party over here who uses it everywhere. Everywhere they are in power, the Labour Party uses standardised testing. It is not the test and the assessments that you do not like. It is not that. It is not even the standardisation of it. It is the SNP, but it is at the end of it that you do not like. That is the terrible thing about this debate today, because it is not about child education. It is not about the assessments. It is about trying to get one. It is about people smelling blood thinking that they can get a victory on what they should be doing. They should be concentrating and making sure that every child gets the education that they can and gets the start that they deserve, and that is right in primary 1. Can I again remind members that they should always speak through the chair, and I call Alison Harris, to be followed by Maureen Watt. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I am delighted to speak in this debate this afternoon in support of my party's motion on this important subject. There is a clear role that assessments can play in the drive to raise educational standards. However, the contributions from my colleagues that they have made so far have made it especially clear why we must support the motion calling for a halt to P1 testing. They have highlighted the significant educational evidence that underpins the need to halt those assessments at the primary 1 level. What has been introduced for primary 1 children sits very uneasily with the play-based philosophy of early years provision set out in the curriculum for excellence. My colleagues have also demonstrated that this debate is of such importance, not for political reasons, as we have heard more than once today, but because this debate will impact in the lives of four and five-year-old children, the youngest and potentially the most vulnerable children in our education system. However, it is not only those young people who have been impacted by the botched implementation of standardised assessment at the primary 1 level. Their parents have also been affected, and that is who I will focus on today. Parents should not have to fight for accurate and transparent information about their children. When they request information from the Scottish Government about the assessments that their children are undertaking, the response should be clear and correct at the very least. I look at the timeline of Scottish Government interventions in this prolonged conversation on primary 1 testing. It is obvious that this has not been the case. Firstly, Scottish Government documents did not make it clear if parents could withdraw children from those assessments. Then, emails released under freedom of information legislation revealed that a Scottish Government civil servant said, and I quote, Children can be withdrawn. Weeks later, a Scottish Government spokesperson said, There is no statutory right for parents to withdraw their children from any aspect of schooling other than from some parts of religious education. Finally, a civil servant misquoted advice from Solar, the Society of Local Authority Lawyers in Scotland. This organisation publicly refuted the Government's statement. Looking at this series of messages, who can blame parents for being confused when this SNP Government contradicts itself on a weekly basis? She is mentioned quite rightly about how parents deserve information. Can I ask her how she squares the need to give parents information about how their children are doing with her preferred option of stopping assessments that have been in place for a number of years? I feel that we have a very professional teaching in teachers, and they are very capable—in fact, more than capable—of assessing children and giving them information to parents on the daily basis that they require. The cabinet secretary's apology to Parliament for the last error was welcome, but it does not change the fact that this level of confusion is unacceptable. Hardworking parents do not have time to decipher muddled messaging from the Scottish Government. On a topic as paramount as their children's education, they simply should not have to do so. Parents should not encounter political spin when they ask about their children. It is little wonder that opinion of local schools was at record lows in the Scotland's People's Annual Report, a Scottish Government publication released two weeks ago. In 2011, 85 per cent of people were very or fairly satisfied with the quality of local schools. That has now dropped to just 70 per cent in 2017. Under the SNP's, parents' confidence in schools is plummeting. And yet, only this week, the cabinet secretary appeared on Sunday politics to say that he may not respect the view of Parliament on today's Scottish Conservative motion. I sincerely hope that that will not be the case, and I shall remain hopeful until proven otherwise. Because parents, teachers and organisations from upstart to the Scottish Child Minding Association to the EIS, are giving the cabinet secretary a clear message. It should be play-based learning, not tests for primary 1 children, not tests for Scottish children at an early age when many European countries would not start for up to two years their formal education. Whilst five-year-olds in Frankfurt and Florence are happily enjoying the play-based learning of kindergarten, we have five-year-olds in Falkirk having to face the pressure, stress and anxiety of standardised testing. The clear message that parents and education professionals are sending the Government is shared by those on this side of the chamber. It is also shared in the principles of the Scottish Government's curriculum for excellence. By continuing with those assessments, the SNP are disregarding the guidelines within their own documents. That can only add to the confusion for parents and teachers who are already struggling to cope with the excessive bureaucracy and workload that has been foisted on them by the SNP's handling of the implementation of the curriculum for excellence. It is time that the cabinet secretary listened. He is aware that we in this party are behind him on the principle of standardised assessment in general, but going forward there are two things that have become clear. First, those assessments cannot continue for children as young as four, and secondly, quite simply, parents must be treated better. In conclusion, I would like to quote the words of the Executive Director of Connect, Eileen Pryor, who said, whether they are called national tests or national assessments, whether the Scottish Government said they are tests or they aren't, it's time to scrap them for P1 children. Thank you. Maureen Watt, followed by Daniel Johnson. Thank you, Presiding Officer, for affording me the opportunity to speak in this debate, which, as Clare Adamson said, from some contributions has been more heat than light. It is the fact that nearly everybody feels qualified to speak in education, because they have obviously been through the education system themselves and may have children or even grandchildren more recently in our education system. My own interest in education stems from my mother teaching primary one, or the reception class, for many years, having worked myself in the sector, both at secondary and college level, having chaired my children's primary school parent council, but most importantly and relevant, having driven forward the implementation of curriculum for excellence as Minister for Schools and Skills from 2007 to 2009. An education system, which we should not forget, is world-leading and which many educationalists across the world are watching with interest and envy and adopting elsewhere, not at the moment. As we've heard already, primary one testing is not new. 29 of the 32 local authorities carried out this testing prior to the introduction of national assessment. As Lindsay Paterson, Professor of Education Policy at Edinburgh University, and not infrequent critic of Government policy said, the simple fact is, as unpalatable as it is for many politicians and teaching unions, is that education cannot do without tests. Only reliable data from scientifically standardised tests can enable us to learn from both the failures and the successors. Professor Paterson's words, Presiding Officer, are not mine. Joanne Lamont Issue about the 29 local authorities who do testing. I have been involved in these testing, there is no comparison to what has been described now, but would an option be for there to be discussions through the HMI with the three authorities that do not have those kinds of assessments and that they could decide what kind of assessment it would be and whether it was appropriate or not in the ways that it was done? Joanne Lamont Maureen Watt I was just going on to say, Presiding Officer, that if we didn't have nationalised standardised testing, it would of course be left to local authorities to do their own. Then the Opposition parties would be complaining about a lack of consistency and a lack of standardisation and a postcode lottery. The Opposition parties are keen to try and find evidence on early years testing. The truth is, Presiding Officer, I really don't think that there's much of that out there. I did find one relating to kindergarten in the US, where it begins by saying that there is a long history of screening children in kindergarten for sensory language and cognitive abilities in order to refer children with disabilities for early treatment. It goes on to say that students who do not perform as expected on the assessments can be classified at risk and teachers can alter their instruction. It might be good if you just listened to a paper on this particular issue. Students who do not perform as expected on the assessments can be classified at risk and teachers can alter their instruction. Maureen Watt, could you halt for a moment? It's quite clear, can I say to Mr Mundell, that Mr Johnson that Ms Watt is not giving way? That teachers can alter their instruction to help to ensure that students are learning to read and not falling through the cracks. Early detection can deter later reading problems. It says that, with intensive intervention, student ages 8 to 10 could increase their accuracy in reading but could not catch up in their fluency rate, so 8 to 10 is already too late. In the US, kindergarteners are encouraged to use assessment to inform instruction with the end goal of increasing student achievement. So, cabinet secretary, I have not had one single constituent contact me on the issue of P1 testing, but what on earth do I say to the constituents who come to me to say that their child's possible autism has not been picked up and addressed, or their AHD, or their hearing difficulty, or their sight difficulty, or their dyslexia, or any other conditions, because the opportunity in P1 tests has been scrapped because of a blatant politicking by the Opposition parties. That has nothing to do with our children and their future and getting it right for every child and having individualised learning plans and raising attainment and giving every child an equal start in life, but everything to do with the kind of negative to even destructive opposition of the Conservatives in this current Parliament. Today, they have been called out not only as being uninterested in the wellbeing and education of our children, but only those who are growing up in loving, nurturing surroundings are fit and healthy and thriving and not at all interested in identifying those children who are struggling because they have not had that nurturing environment, or are hungry because of the Tory's disgraceful welfare policies, or have experienced too many aces in their lives, which is inhibiting their concentration and ability to learn. Today, we see the Conservatives all over the place, as their hypocrisy is called out. Previously, they were all in favour of tests. Last week, it was scrapped the test. This week, it is suspended them or the test is too difficult or it is not telling us enough, which is it, and only five or six members took the time to go and find out about the tests for themselves. Cabinet Secretary, those tests have not even had a year's run. Of course, they should be reviewed and refined if necessary, but do not kowtow to the disgraceful chances that surround us in this chamber. Daniel Johnson, to be followed by Stuart Stevenson. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I am going to take a bit of a deep breath. This was not the way I was planning to start these remarks, but I think that there has to be a correction in some of the statements that we have just heard. It is simply a mistake, a mistake to confuse assessments of neurodevelopmental disorders with testing. They are completely and utterly different things. We need to be building understanding on neurodevelopmental disorders, not blurring the boundaries between the different categories, because that is not going to help those arguments, not going to help those debates, not going to help the understanding that people with dyslexia, with ASD, with ADHD, need in terms of getting the help they do. I would argue that these tests are a barrier to those things, not helping. If I could identify one question alone, one of the questions in those tests is, what sounds like this dot, dot, dot, with a picture of a feather? I would argue that if you are a child with a test-expectrum disorder or with dyslexia, perhaps with ADHD, you would find that question in particular hugely stressful, difficult to answer. You would be left confronted and confused with what you were meant to ask, and do not tell me that it is all right because it is a multiple choice question. Those are five-year-olds who have never had to sit at a multiple choice test in their lives before, so do not tell me that it is straightforward, and let us not confuse diagnostic tests with academic tests for literacy and numeracy. What I was wanting to say in my remarks is that it is important that we look at the merits of those tests, what they are aimed to do and how they do that in the context of the education system that we all want. That is not party political. That should be about having a dispassionate debate, an objective debate, about what role those tests have in general, but more importantly, and I think that this is important in terms of this debate, specifically, what role can they possibly play for five-year-olds in P1? I think that that is what sets the heart, because there has been too much blurring also of the general to the particular. The arguments around the generalities of testing, having to make sure that children get used to testing, and then the specifics of P1 testing. I would argue that the two are very different, but I speak in this debate from that perspective, not as a politician but as a parent. I had to learn a bit of my own lesson the other day when—this was a fantastic opportunity, one of pride, when my daughter, who is six, just gone into P2, who did sit the test last year—and, by the way, we did not find out about them in advance. However, when she, for the first time, read her own bedtime story—I did not really tell her the bedtime story—she read me it, and she did it with passion and with joy. She read the words that were not all straightforward, such as enchanted, it was Cinderella, and other words such that, with intonation and with a pleasure, which meant that I saw that her education was working. I did not need a test to tell me that, and what is more, a mere matter of weeks before—and this is where the lesson was for me—I was worried about whether her reading was up to scratch or not, whether or not we had to spend more time and attention with her at home trying to get her up to speed. That would have been wrong, because the value of her education at this point is not about the precision with which she reads, it is about the passion that she reads, the enjoyment that she gets and the fact that she finds it useful for her own life. That is what a five-year-old should be reaching in primary on, not arbitrary academic standards, which is for something much later than the line in terms of their academic careers. However, it strikes me that testing at this point is counterproductive in far more fundamental ways. If we believe in curriculum for instance, if we believe in the philosophy that was meant to enshrine, it is about trusting teachers, allowing them to design the curriculum that is relevant to their communities and their children, that does not do that. That is putting arbitrary, centralised tests, which ultimately teachers are always going to teach to, and we do not want teaching to the test, but at least of which in the early years, when we ought to be encouraging learning through play. I fail to see how testing for literacy and numeracy using multiple-choice tests is compatible with learning through play in any conceivable way. What is more, I think, is Stifles innovation. I know that the Deputy First Minister is passionate about ensuring that we engender a culture of innovation in our education system, and I agree with him on that. Indeed, again, one of my personal lessons is seeing the value of that innovation, which we have seen in my daughter's school, where they have combined the nursery in primary 1. They do not have fixed classrooms or fixed teachers through the day. They have embraced play through learning and have combined the approach of the nursery in primary 1. I fear that, if you impose tests such as that, ultimately, it will make teachers fearful of innovating like that, because they know that they are going to be tested and they will be fearful whether or not those innovations are simply not worth the risk. Ultimately, we need to learn the lessons from elsewhere in the world. Ross Greer set out the case and the lessons from Finland are very, very well. It is clear that high-performing education systems trust their teachers. They pursue a less centralised, less prescriptive method, and they trust the professional judgments rather than testing in order to assess children. I am sorry, but I am not sure that Mr Johnson has time. He has to wind up in the next 30 seconds. This is the direction that the debate should have been taking. It is not about what party said what and when, or whether it could find a press release or a speech saying something or other. It is whether or not tests are helpful for our five-year-old children or not. That is the substance. That is what is at stake this afternoon. That is what we should be discussing. Let us ignore the rest of this political flim-flam and nonsense. It is very clear that, if you are serious about the education of our five-year-olds, testing them can play no part in their school experience. I am afraid that I bring probably the least-experienced and relevant life to this debate of anyone so far. Three years of lecturing to postgraduate students does not qualify me as a teacher, that is for sure. I am not a dad, so I have nothing there. On the other hand, I have nine great-nephews and nieces, a goddaughter and seven nephews and nieces. I have got some exposure to it. I will pick up on Daniel Johnson and say a multiple choice test to be stressful. Believe me, I found it quite stressful standing beside my goddaughter when she was not yet three with a portsoil ice cream shop gift voucher in her hand. We were experiencing the multiple choice between the 32 brands of ice cream that were there as we went through and made choices. That illustrates, I think, a general point that developing skills starts very early. By the time that you get to five, I think that every child has gone through many multiple choice examinations that they just aren't in the academic sector. There is nothing unfamiliar about being presented with choices. I just give that as an illustration of how we may all be guilty of overplaying some of the issues that are here. I also, in early stage of the debate, but it has been remedied later, in particular by Alison Harris, the early speakers made comparatively little mention of the children. I think that we should put the children at the centre of the debate, rather than perhaps putting the teachers at the centre of the debate. Clearly, the teachers are not unimportant and neither are the parents. That is for absolutely sure. The real thing that there is in the debate is that the Conservatives have changed their mind and they are entitled so to do. I have occasionally changed my mind and my political colleagues have, too. There is nothing wrong with that. If new information comes along, then new conclusions can reasonably be reached. However, the real question is what is the Tory position about testing overall. That takes me back to my intervention on Liz Smith at the very first contribution to the debate. South of the border, they are moving in a very different direction at the Tories. The new reception baseline assessment will be statutory for all pupils in England for September 2020. That is for the reception class, in other words, at kindergarten before you get to primary school. It is also coupled with testing in the first year of primary school and testing in the second year of primary school south of the border. The National Foundation for Educational Research has said that our experience in producing a reception baseline demonstrated that it is possible to undertake a robust assessment of children's language, literacy and numeracy skills at this age—in other words, four, five or six. I think that we should hold on to that expert advice. Indeed, it is vitally important to the lasting and significant change that parents and teachers be provided with transparent and consistent information. That is what the Tories are introducing in England. They have bruntly tried to disconnect the Tories in Scotland from that and take a different position, but it is one Tory party, so I am not at all clear on what basis we should properly look. Yes, I will. Mr Stevenson, I have to say that there is a lot of opposition to the concerns of what is happening in south of the border for exactly the same reasons that there are concerns up here. It is quite interesting that the Tories therefore—I have a confession here, I think—that the Tories are getting it wrong. If they are getting it wrong in England, it is perfectly possible for us to consider that they might be getting it wrong in Scotland. He will, he will. Brian Whittle I thank Mr Stevenson for taking his intervention. In saying that perhaps we would take a different position to what is happening in south of the border, Mr Stevenson conceded that perhaps you might be getting it wrong up here. Stuart Stevenson I am rarely accused of getting it wrong and never admit it. No, that, of course, is not true. I will always look at the evidence, but the evidence here is that, like Maureen Watt, I have not had a single constituent to get me on this subject. This is not the talk of the steamy among those for whom matters, the pupils and the parents. It simply is not. That is the kind of evidence that is driving me. I have to say that some of the debate is said that children at the age of four, five, six should not be exposed to computers. I have to say that I spent 30 years working in computers, but I find that most six-year-olds are more adept at working their tablet than I am. I do not think that that is a particularly credible argument. In conclusion, just one or two things. Even in Denmark, local government wants to introduce statutory testing for three-year-olds in kindergarten. There are many different ways of looking at the problem, and I am very happy to support the Scottish Government's approach. Finally, testing is important. Would you let a driver in the road with a driver's test? Michelle Ballantyne will be followed by Gordon Macdonald. I thank you, Presiding Officer. This gets more and more interesting as it goes on. Like Liz Smith and my colleagues, I believe that assessment is a key part of learning and education, not least of all so that we can ensure progress and understand where a child has got to, but also so that we have some degree of accountability in terms of our education system as a whole. However, today is not about that. It is not about whether we should formally assess our children during their education. It is about the value and appropriateness of doing so in P1. The early years of education are about building the foundations of literacy and numeracy, and children need to develop that confidence in using language. Although I am not always a cheerleader for curriculum for excellence, its early years positioning is about the holistic development of the child based on structured play. That enables the individual child to broaden their vocabulary, develop more complex sentence structures, recognise patterns and ensure that, no matter what their starting point, they will be equipped to cope with the rigours of formal learning and assessment as they go through the system. We know that children do not all develop their readiness for formal learning at the same age, and structured play has a huge role in contributing not only to that readiness, but also to the way in which the individual child will engage in literacy and numeracy later on—the very things that Daniel Johnson was referring to. Being able to access and understand information effectively is critical to our children's life chances and wellbeing. Most of us in this chamber are not experts in education, and therefore it is incumbent on us to pay heed to both educationists and teachers. Although I acknowledge that the difference of opinions exists, there is increasing evidence and clarity from all sides that formal standardised tests in P1 cut across the principles of a play-based curriculum. I was one of the people who took the time yesterday to attend the event that the Cabinet Secretary arranged to try out the P1 assessment and to discuss with the project team the intentions behind it, and I want to thank Mr Swinney for that opportunity, because although I might have seen it in schools, it was really good to talk to the team that was developing it. However—and here is the big however—you may be a bit disappointed to hear that it only really served to confirm my view that the administration of the assessment in P1 does have little or no real value. First of all, the use of the term standardised, I found really quite confusing by the end of the meeting, because each child may be given the assessment in a different way. They could be given it alone, in a group, with a P7 buddy, with a teacher, it could be at the beginning of P1, the end of P1, in the middle of P1, and of course you've already got a potential years age difference in the children in P1. They could do it by reading what's on the screen, or they could listen to what the screen tells them by pressing the button, or it could be read out by the person with them. Not every child would complete the whole assessment, depending on how difficult they found it. Although I can accept that the argument that the assessment shouldn't cause the child undue stress, if it is administered appropriately, clearly there were considerable and our considerable resources challenges, both in terms of the time that it takes to set it up, to administer it and to wind up afterwards, and the facilities needed, because many teachers have been telling me that they don't have the computers in their classrooms, the children have to leave the classroom to actually undertake the assessment for the first time, and there is a pressure if you can't actually do all that in a very supportive way, there is a pressure on the child when they're doing it an assessment for the first time. Unlike the design of most learning and development tools for that age group, there was no positive feedback or encouragement built into the process, and there was confusion about exactly how the results would be used. We asked the questions and initially we were told they were just for the teacher, and maybe the head teacher, and then later in the discussion we were told it could create performance tables, and we've heard all of this said earlier. But we were also told that it enabled the process of the child to be tracked, and yet it was made quite clear that the test can only be delivered once, and actually the system blocks you out after that, so it can't be re-administered, so there's no way of seeing if the child has actually improved. So therefore I asked was it the, therefore a baseline of the child's ability, and I was told no, it wasn't that either. We were told that the assessment would allow the teacher and head teacher to understand where the child was in comparison to others, and identified their strengths and weaknesses in their knowledge and understanding. But when asked if a competent teacher could do this without the standardized test in B1, we were told yes, but they might not have had the time to get to know the child in that level of detail, and the test would speed things up. I can't say I found that terribly edifying, because I do hope my primary one teacher will know my child, or hopefully my grandchildren, in time to come. But the thing is, I don't doubt the Cabinet Secretary's sincerity when he said we need to keep this in some sense of perspective, because what I do not want to happen is that young people come through education system, have an issue which is not identified early enough, when all the international evidence tells us that if you don't identify an issue in an individual at the earliest possible opportunity, it'll just get worse and worse. I have to ask the Cabinet Secretary these tests. Do you believe that they identify the barriers to learning such as dyslexia, dyswrapsia, visual or auditory limitations? I think that they are the things that needed to be identified earlier, B1. If we can identify and address those, then we would be making real progress, but I don't believe that those are captured by those assessments. I would welcome comment from the Cabinet Secretary on improving early access to assessments and support for those very real barriers. In a recent BBC interview, you said that you remained open to ways in which you could reduce the workload for teachers. You said that my door is very much open on this question to reduce the amount of bureaucratic burden that teachers feel they are facing. I would put to you that today is an opportunity to do just that by supporting that motion. Gordon MacDonald, the last of the open debate, will move into closing speeches after that. Gordon MacDonald. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. The debate should have been about making sure that teachers have access to good quality information to help them to inform their judgment about pupil performance. It should have been about making sure that parents have access to information about the performance of their children and the skills that they are learning. It should have been about making sure that the right people have access to the right information about our young people in order to ensure that progress can be made to raise attainment. Instead, what I have witnessed is political parties willfully rewriting history, a history in which Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservative parties have supported assessments in primary 1. It is blatant political opportunism and that they are prepared to do this at the expense of kids' education is an utter disgrace. Ignoring the political point scoring that has been going on, let me move on and actually talk about what is going on in our skills just now. Attending the information event yesterday, I and a number of SNP colleagues heard that assessments are only taken by children once during the school year and there is no set timetable. The assessments do not have to take place at a set time of year, but when teachers and schools decide that the pupils are ready, the assessments consist of around 30 questions on an average take 27 minutes, but there is no time limit. The answers are multiple choice and get progressively harder or easier depending on each individual's pupils' ability. They are completed online and are marked automatically saving the teacher time and allowing them to focus on teaching. Teachers get instant feedback from their assessments so that they can provide the support needed for each child's numeracy and literacy development. Of course, no new system of assessment will be perfect. That is why the Scottish Government published the user review report on 28 August on the first year of the assessments, and I have already made changes. A local teacher I spoke to highlighted that their school has a computer suite, which means that the pupils have to go to a separate unfamiliar room for the assessment. That should be addressed. Ideally, children should be able to take the assessment in a familiar environment, but to call for a ban on standardised national assessment is not the answer. It is just short-sighted political opportunism. In carrying out research for this debate, I came across an education department report that stated that, in primary school, standardised assessment using local authority tests at the beginning and end of P1 and literacy and numeracy has been established for the last 10 years. The report then continues by highlighting that the results of those assessments are used in many ways by schools and lists eight benefits, including to contribute to the identification of pupils who may require additional support and to support the process of monitoring pupils' progress. One thing that I forgot to mention is that the extract is from the attainment report for the Education, Children and Families Committee for Edinburgh City Council published in March 2009. Regarding the 2008 academic year, the report highlights that standardised assessments have been used in Edinburgh schools since June 1998, and they continue up until the present day. Political parties in Edinburgh are so opposed to re-standardised assessments that, during the eight years that Labour controlled the council, they made no attempts to reverse the policy. The Liberal Democrat coalition of 2007 to 2012 made no attempts to reverse the policy, and the Labour coalition from 2012 to 2017 also made no attempts to reverse the policy, which introduced itself back in 1998. However, the hypocrisy by those political parties now opposed to P1 testing did not just happen in our capital city. Out of 32 local authorities, 29 councils already carried out annual P1 assessments. Councils were Labour, Liberal Democrats and Conservative parties were in administration. Not only did those councils already carry out P1 assessments but many of them had two P1 assessments, one at the start and also at the end of P1. So why? There was no issue when their own councils were carrying out P1 assessments, but there is now. The only difference that I can see is that it is an SNP Scottish Government administering them, and it saves councils £9 million a year to suddenly claim that there is an issue with P1 assessments when an SNP Government adopts the policy nationally is insincere, and they should be ashamed of themselves. They have sought a chance to attack the SNP, and I have had no problem doing a 180-degree turn on their own manifesto promises and the policies that their own councils have implemented. It is disgraceful. I am in my last minute, but the fact of the matter is that when it comes to educating our young people, no party should be exploiting those issues for political gain. Nobody should be standing in the way of driving up standards in our schools just for the sake of some headline-grabbing political kick-about. Unfortunately, that is all that we have seen from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives today. We move now to closing speeches, and I call on Mary Fee to wind up for the Labour Party to be followed by the cabinet secretary, John Swinney. Thank you, Presiding Officer. In closing for Scottish Labour, can I begin by thanking the Conservatives for bringing this debate to the chamber today? I will be voting in favour of the motion to stop testing primary 1 children in our schools. I do so at the behest of parents and teachers from across West Scotland who have contacted me in the last week and in the last few months. Let me repeat what Ian Gray said in opening the debate today for Labour. We on this side of the chamber have no problem with teachers assessing pupils. Teachers assess pupils' learning every day using a whole variety of techniques and diagnostic methodologies, and deploy their professional expertise to do so. Nor do we have a problem with the testing of literacy and numeracy. However, the idea that children as young as four and a half years old are being assessed in our schools is quite frankly absurd. For the Scottish Government to pretend that this is about assessing and tackling attainment is nonsense, and the range of evidence and opinion on this shows how out of touch the SNP are with teachers and with parents. A child born in late February 2014 would be sitting in the same test as a child born in April 2013. The age gap is nothing new in our education system. However, the development of four and five-year-olds can be staggeringly different, more so at that age than at any other age of primary or secondary school. Children in primary 1 should learn in a stress-free and welcoming environment with constant support from teachers and from support workers. Every hour, the teacher spends on carrying out these tests is an hour that could have been better spent developing and supporting basic educational and emotional skills of our children. I stated at the outset that teachers and parents from West Scotland have been in touch with me over the flawed policy. Not at the moment. I would like to make just a little bit of progress, please. I would like to read out a few of their comments. One teacher in Renfrewshire writes that the best data on pupils is gathered by teachers while teaching through the formative assessment that takes place every day in classrooms. I believe that the Scottish Government has chosen not to listen to teachers and even their own expert advisers. Those are the sincere beliefs and experiences of a teacher dealing with young children every single day. At the heart of the debate lies a serious question. Why does the cabinet secretary think that he knows better than teachers with decades of experience and better than parents who best know the wellbeing of their children? It is the blinkered view of the cabinet secretary that is causing this unnecessary damage in our schools. Instead of teachers teaching, we waste resources that are already stretched in carrying out useless tests of four and five-year-olds. Another teacher this time from Inverclyde contacted me to say that four and five-year-olds are expected to sit at a computer for up to and in many cases more than an hour for each of three assessments. They are using equipment with which they may be unfamiliar, on a wi-fi or hardware connection that is not fit for purpose to engage in repetitive activities. That needs adult supervision, often taking classroom assistants, nurture teachers, learning support teachers and, in many cases, management teams away from their normal duties. That then impacts on the rest of the school and on the workloads of that staff. And for what? For a bureaucratic nightmare. Another teacher from Renfrewshire writes, as a teacher and an EIS member, I am contacting you to ask you to back scrapping these tests. In my own school they have caused stress and upset both to children and to staff. Testing young children is not necessary. The data gathered is not useful. Those tests set children up for a lifetime of hating tests. If Scottish teachers are truly going to get it right for every child, then scrapping these tests goes some way to doing that. Those are staff on the front line of teaching, not sitting in a central Government office. They know better than any member of the cabinet and I would ask the Scottish Government to listen to those voices. I am very sorry, Mr Dornan, but I will not be able to take your intervention. I wanted to make some progress in some of the comments that I wanted to make. I would like to, however, in the very few seconds that I have left, pick up a comment that Mr Dornan made in his contribution, when he said that children cry all the time and that it is going to happen to do with tests. When a parent says that the tests made their child feel sick and cry and that their child was crying because they were made to go on a computer and they could not use it to do the tests, that is not the support of a nurturing environment that I want any of our children to be in. If this Parliament votes today to halt the assessments for primary 1 children, then that is what the Scottish Government must do and the cabinet secretary must listen to the voice of Parliament. If not, it further tells teachers and parents that the cabinet secretary's arrogance knows no bounds and that the Scottish Government knows better than them. Do much right for foreign families and end us vanity project. I thank Michelle Ballantyne for the kind comments that she made about my officials who put on the demonstration yesterday. I asked her to do that because I felt that it would help to inform the debate and to give members the opportunity to interact with questions. I appreciate her kindness in expressing comments about the way that my officials interacted on that matter. One of the points that Johann Lamont raised was that the Government had not followed the evidence and had not made any attempts to build consensus in this debate. The evidence that the Government followed was the evidence that we commissioned from the OECD when, in response to the information that became apparent about the fallen standards that were identified by the Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy, we invited the OECD to review Scottish education. The OECD said, as I said in my earlier remarks, that there needs to be a more robust evidence base right across the system, especially about learning outcomes and progress. It is on the basis of that evidence and advice that we acted to address the issue. Why was our response in relation to standardised assessment? The response was because we already had 29 out of 32 local authorities undertaking some form of standardised assessment, albeit of different character around the country. Indeed, a 30th local authority, South Lanarkshire, was considering embarking upon a form of standardised assessment, but when they heard that the Government was prepared to address this issue, they held back until the Government was able to put its approach in place. Mary Fee has just raised a concern from a teacher in Inverclyde about the application of the computer-based Scottish national standardised assessment. She raised that comment from Inverclyde. In Inverclyde, the local authority has been using an on-screen computer-based, non-adaptive standardised assessment for many years. The difference between it and what I have put in place is that Inverclyde council has been applying that twice during primary 1. The idea that Scottish national standardised assessments have somehow been applied in a way that has fundamentally changed the way in which young people are assessed at local level. Given that evidence that I have just cited about Inverclyde is, I am afraid, erroneous suggestions to be made. I go back to the point that I made earlier about impugning the motives of people who raise concerns. Do you have an idea of why school teachers, parents and carers are expressing concern if that is something that has been happening routinely all along? Why are school teachers highlighting those concerns about those proposals? I am not impugning anyone's motives. It is not my fault. I am grateful to Mr Scott for his enthusiastic support for that remark. I do not impugn people's motives. I face a challenge here where Parliament is holding us to account about the need to improve standards in our schools. When the Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy came out in 2015, we were not able to identify where the weaknesses and performance were around the country because there was no consistent data, which is exactly what the OECD highlighted, which is why we gravitated from 29 out of 32 local authorities undertaking different forms of assessment into a standardised assessment right across the country, and I think that that is a pretty logical move. John Lamont asked me about teachers, and lots of teachers have been quoted. Let me quote a teacher from the EIS survey. Data is incredibly detailed and personalised. Feedback will be very useful in looking for next steps. Some of our data showed areas of weakness that we had not expected and some showed strength, especially in P1 that we had not expected. We can all say that there is feedback from teachers, but it varies around the country as to what people will say. I hear people talking about my arrogance in this debate. I have adapted and changed those assessments. I have not said everything is perfect. I went out last year and I commissioned a user survey and I commissioned feedback from practitioners and it led to significant changes in the assessments about the replenishment of questions, about improving question design, about updating the practice assessment and about providing advice and exemplification on classroom management and in relation to establishing a P1 practitioner forum to hear more feedback from the teaching profession as we work through year by year on those assessments. The reason why we need to do that is to address the comments made by the president of the Association of Directors of Education, who said the other day that we suffered too much in education from decisions being made too quickly, might ask us for politicians to pause and allow us time to evaluate the effectiveness of those assessments. Mr Johnson wants to— Daniel Johnson. Just on that point and on amending the test, I have very real concerns about the compatibility of those tests with neurodevelopment disorders. Will the cabinet secretary undertake to get the test assessed for compatibility with dyslexia, ASD and other neurodevelopment disorders? Fundamentally, teacher judgment comes in here because 100 per cent of eligible young people did not take part in the assessments. It was 94 per cent. That is the teaching profession exercising the type of professional judgment that I would ask them to do to say that it is not appropriate for a young, particular child to take that forward. Mr Johnson raised the issue of the connection and compatibility with play. I understand the model of education that he talks about in his child's school in Edinburgh. I am very familiar with it. That is what the curriculum for excellence is designed to do. I remind Mr Johnson that it is play for learning. At some stage, we have to assess the learning that young people are undertaking to satisfy ourselves that they have reached the early level, which will then give us the foundation and the platform for them to move on to first level. The last comment that I want to make is in relation to some of the comments that have been made about the international advice and evidence. Pasi Salberg, who is an eminent global educationist who originates from Finland, a man for whom I have huge respect and whose writings I follow assiduously, said this this morning. P1 assessment in Scotland is not a standardised test. It is a diagnostic tool to support teachers, professional decisions and judgment. We were critical of high-stakes standardised testing in the international council, not this one. I am afraid that Mr Gray will have to hear that. He knows that I am a generous amount of interventions, but I have reached the maximum time that I can speak. That is information from eminent educators that demonstrate that the Government has taken the considered steps to support professional judgment, and I asked Parliament to support those measures today. Thank you. I call Oliver Mundell to wind up the debate on behalf of the Conservative Party. I did not think after this morning's education committee meeting that I could be any more depressed about this Government's attitude towards education than I felt through this afternoon. I think that it is pretty disingenuous for the cabinet secretary to get up at the 11th hour and give a very gentle measured talk through of some of the points in the debate when he spent the last week trying to shout down opposition. Every single one of his back benchers has adopted the same approach, refusing to take interventions on specific points. We were promised a facts-based debate. Absolutely. James Jordan. Does he remember me taking an intervention from himself, or is he just going to make things up as he goes along through the costly speech? Oliver Mundell. I remember the member taking the first intervention, not answering the specific point that I raised and refusing to continue the debate and address some of the further issues that have emerged around those tests. I think that it is very disappointing that we were promised a facts-based debate and, instead, we have spent most of the time politicking as usual. I am very proud to say that, on those benches, we are willing to listen, evaluate the evidence and change our minds. We are not embarrassed to listen to the evidence, to listen to the many voices in Scottish education and to take a measured and appropriate view. We are not saying to scrap all standardised assessments. What we are saying is that primary one is not the appropriate point to start it. I think that the cabinet secretary would do well to listen to that. Just as we have offered our support when it comes to reforming education, that for us is not some political move or some calculated agenda. It is because we think that educational reform is important. We have been saying it and arguing for it for years. I think that what we are seeing is facts. Mr Mundell understands the degree of doubt that we would have in our minds about his commitment to educational reform when, last week, his leader was asking for more information about schools and today the Conservatives are advancing the argument for less information about schools. Does he not see the natural inconsistency in the arguments that the Conservative party has deployed and why many of us here believe that the Conservatives are just doing this for a political hit on the Government? Oliver Mundell? Does not that point just say it all? When you are finished, cabinet secretary, that point just says it all because the SNP start from the point of view that this Government starts on the most important issue on the top priority for our country of thinking that everything is about politics and positioning and gestures instead of looking at the evidence. On the substance of the point, there is quite a considerable difference from asking for useful information that has an evidence base behind it. Pursuing hell-ben at all costs a set of assessments that have no rigorous evidence behind them. We have heard questions this morning and I would have been much more impressed—I know that Michelle Ballantyne was impressed—to see the assessments, but I would have been much more impressed if the cabinet secretary, ahead of this debate, had made available to us the robust evidence that exists to prove that those assessments work and that they tell us something useful. What I am hearing from teachers is that there are a number of fundamental flaws in the system that has been brought forward. Smart children are clicking on random options in order to speed up the process of getting through the test. People like myself, who suffer from dyspraxia and dyslexia, are finding that the tests do not work for them, that do not assess their potential or their capacity. It was quite offensive and disingenuous to parents to hear some of the comments from Maureen Watt, which I do not think have any evidence base. As far as I am aware, the study that she was referring to was not about the type of test that is being used in classrooms here in Scotland. If we really want to get on to politics, negativity and unpleasantness, I have had Marie Todd shouting to me across the corridor here. Throughout the debate about Westminster and what is happening in England and Wales, I would like to afford her this opportunity if she wants to take it. If we are having a fax-based debate to explain to this chamber the different choices that have been taken in England and Wales to those that have been taken here in Scotland in relation to the founding principles and the type of curriculum that we choose to have. Maureen Watt, forgive me for being sceptical when the Conservatives come to this chamber painting themselves as the champions for the children of Scotland and as the champions for upholding the will of this Parliament, because this Parliament made it very clear that universal credit is the two-child cap. The welfare reform is sending our children to school hungry. What are your policies in the UK government on welfare reform doing to improve attainment in our schools that poverty-related attainment gap to give it its full title? There we go, ladies and gentlemen. That is how we build consensus around education and have a fax-based debate. If we are going to have a fax-based debate, I will explain to Marie Todd that in England and Wales, they have gone for a much more formal early years process based on knowledge, tests are therefore assessing the start of that formal education process. They have decided rightly or wrongly for them and I remind the Scottish Government that education is devolved and it has been separate here in Scotland even since before devolution. We managed perfectly well under previous systems without those assessments and attainment in many areas was far better. Rather than digging in deeper and trying to tell us that evidence is on their side, it is time for the Scottish Government to start listening, to slow down a little bit and assess whether or not their own assessments are working. Thank you very much. That concludes our debate on primary one tests. We will move on to the next item of business, which is consideration of a business motion 13975, in the name of Graham Day, on behalf of the Parliamentary Bureau, setting out a business programme. I would remind members that under a new procedure any member can comment on those business motions. They would be best to do so by notifying the chair by three o'clock that day. I call on Graham Day to move the motion. Does any member wish to speak against the motion? No one does. The question therefore is that motion 13975 be agreed. Are we all agreed? We are agreed. The next item of business is consideration of business motions 13977 on a stage 1 timetable and 13978 on a stage 2 timetable. Does any member wish to speak against either of those motions? No, that is good. The question therefore is that motions 13977 and 13978 be agreed. I have to call Graham Day to move the motions first before I actually call the vote. Thank you very much for today. I assume that no one else is still going to speak against the motions. The question is that motions 13977 and 13978 be agreed. Are we all agreed? Yes. Thank you. The next item of business is consideration of parliamentary motion 13976 on designation of a lead committee. I ask Graham Day to move the motion. Thank you very much. We turn now to decision time. There are three questions today. The first question is that amendment 13945.1, in the name of John Swinney, which seeks to amend motion 13945 in the name of Liz Smith on primary one tests, be agreed. Are we all agreed? Yes. We are not agreed. We will move to a vote. Members may cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment 13945.1, in the name of John Swinney, is yes, 61, no, 63. There were no abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed. The next question is that motion 13945, in the name of Liz Smith on primary one tests, be agreed. Are we all agreed? No. We are not agreed. We will move to a vote. Members may cast their votes now. The result of the vote on motion 13945, in the name of Liz Smith, is yes, 63, no, 61. There were no abstentions. The motion is therefore agreed. And the final question is that motion 13976, in the name of Graham Day, on designation of a lead committee, be agreed. Are we all agreed? Yes. We are agreed. Point of order. Point of order, Richard Leonard. I rise to make a point of order under rule 817 of standing orders. Teachers told this Government that these tests were useless, and ministers ignored them. Parents told this Government that they did not trust these tests, and ministers ignored them. The Scottish Parliament has now voted to scrap these tests. Order, please. Ministers must not now ignore the will of Parliament. The Government must therefore bring forward immediate plans for its response to today's vote. So, Presiding Officer, I ask you how you will authorise that within the rules of this Parliament. Thank you very much, Mr Leonard. The Parliament has passed a motion that is the resolution, therefore it is the will of the Parliament. There is an expectation that the Government will respond seriously to that resolution and will respond appropriately in due course. A further point of order, Johann Lamont. I wonder in discussions with the Government will you reflect on the recommendation from the Commission for Parliamentary Reform that was explicit in saying that when the Government lost a vote they should take it seriously and report when they will come back to the Parliament to see how they are going to respond to that decision, which, as Mary Todd mentioned earlier, is the important will of the Parliament. Can I thank Ms Lamont for that point? As it happens, that particular recommendation of the Commission on Parliamentary Reform is under active consideration by the Parliamentary Bureau at the moment. It is also the Parliamentary Bureau that is the body through which the Parliament as a whole decides when issues should be brought before the Parliament, decides parliamentary business, so it will be for the Parliamentary Bureau to decide when this issue should be brought back. Are there any other points of order? Thank you. That concludes decision time. We will move on now to members' business. The members' business is in the name of Donald Cameron on celebrating 10 years of BBC Alaba. We will just take a few moments for members and the Minister to change seats.