Scottish National Standardised Assessments: national report for academic year 2017-2018

Preface

This report has been developed to provide a summary of outcomes at a national level on the newly established system of national standardised assessments, which has since been termed ‘Scottish National Standardised Assessments’ (SNSA) in the 2017 to 2018 academic year, the first year of the programme.

The report provides information on two main areas:

• What SNSA sets out to measure, by way of a high-level description of each organiser included within the assessments. The descriptions are exemplified by a small number of questions from each of the organisers, with commentary on learner performance on this sample of questions. These questions were presented to learners during the 2017 to 2018 academic year; none of these items are used in SNSA 2018 to 2019, and they will not be used in future Scottish National Standardised Assessments.
• Findings at a national level, showing comparisons across the different organisers within the assessments, and focusing on selected learner characteristics including gender, Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD), ethnic background, free school meals, additional support needs, looked after children at home and away from home, and English as an additional language.

The information in this report is intended to supplement the information already available to schools and local authorities for the 2017 to 2018 academic year, for their own setting, and is intended to provide staff with details of the national picture. These staff may want to consider the information in this report to help determine any support or interventions that may be needed in the current or future school years, such as providing assistance to specific groups, or helping to identify areas of the curriculum that may benefit from an increased focus in learning and teaching.

This report is not intended to form the basis of an accountability measure against which performance will be tracked over time. The main aim of SNSA is to provide a diagnostic tool that can be used as part of a range of evidence to support teachers’ professional judgement of children’s and young people’s progress in learning. The report is intended to support this aim through the dissemination of findings at a national level.