Exclusive:Leading academic takes aim at Scottish Government education statistics as 'deeply flawed'
Professor Lindsay Paterson has dismantled Scottish Government education statistics calling them “deeply flawed”
A leading education academic has said Scottish Government pupil attainment figures are a “fiction” that rely on teachers’ “hunches”.
Professor Lindsay Paterson called educational statistics, published on Tuesday, “deeply flawed” and “misleading”.
As education secretary Jenny Gilruth hailed primary school attainment as the highest on record, Prof Paterson said the results are “statistical fiction”.
In a thorough rebuke to the government, Prof Paterson took aim at primary and secondary attainment records, absence rates and dismantles the means of measuring the controversial poverty-related attainment gap.
The academic, Professor Emeritus of Education Policy at Edinburgh University, said the government’s figures “appear to show a system that is doing extremely well”.
In Scotland, pupil achievements are evaluated at P1, P4, P7 and S3 levels by their teachers as opposed to the international PISA rankings, which are collated by formal assessment.
Prof Paterson said: “These attainment statistics fail to capture the serious decline of attainment that has been picked up by PISA.
“They also fail to record any impact of Covid.
“The reason for the discrepancy between the reported achievement and the PISA results is not difficult to find.
“What is euphemistically called pupils’ achievement of the curriculum levels is in fact teachers’ impressions of whether their own pupils have achieved the levels.
“They are simply hunches.”
The Scottish Government previously used assessments to measure the gap between teacher appraisals and real attainment but these surveys were scrapped in 2008.
Prof Paterson added: “So the political claim that almost all pupils reach satisfactory levels of attainment is a statistical fiction.”
The academic went on to say that government recorded achievements at secondary level can be attributed to a weakening of the exam system, rather than improvements in attainment.
Referring again to the international PISA results in contrast to the Scottish Government’s records, Prof Paterson added: “If the attainment of 15-year-olds has been falling in the way that PISA suggests, then the only reliable conclusion is that the assessment standards of the Nationals and Highers have weakened.
“So the political claims of rising attainment, and of no lasting Covid harm to attainment, are statistical fictions.”
On Tuesday, opposition parties responded to poverty-related attainment gap figures by pointing out the gap in numeracy at primary school would take 133 years to close at current rates.
For literacy that time frame would be 57 years.
Nicola Sturgeon had said in 2016 that her government would eradicate the disparity between the poorest and most well off pupils by 2026.
The Scottish Government uses the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) to measure the socio-economic background of young people.
Prof Paterson, writing for the think tank Enlighten, said the “whole approach mis-uses” the SIMD because it is “misleading as a measure of the social circumstances of individual pupils and their families”.
While it is a useful tool for categorising neighbourhoods, “there are many non-deprived people living in the most deprived neighbourhoods and there is much hidden poverty in the most advantaged places,” he added.
“The problem is that the improved attainment by pupils in the most deprived neighbourhoods might well be due entirely to the growing minority from these non-deprived families.
“Children in families with a graduate parent tend, on average, to have much higher attainment than other children.
“So the apparent fall of inequality might not be due to any relative progress by children in actually deprived families.
“An ostensible narrowing of inequalities because graduates increasingly live in socially deprived neighbourhoods may tell us something about the dire state of the graduate labour market.
“But it does not, on its own, tell us about the quality of the schools.”
One of the most prominent measures of success in Scottish schools are positive leaver destinations (PLD) where young people go on to further education, work, training or volunteering.
Prof Paterson criticised the “amorphous” definitions, saying a stable job, full-time job and a zero-hours arrangement count equally for the purposes of the statistics.
Only around 60 per cent of pupils go on to higher and further education, and training.
Looking ahead to the Holyrood election in 2026, Prof Paterson added: “In short, despite misleading data, attainment is probably not satisfactory, policy is probably not causing inequality to fall, destinations for about a third of school leavers are not, in any genuine sense, ‘positive’, and lavish expenditure is, in large part, a waste of money.
“So when confronted over the next six months by canvassers or candidates or manifestoes – or even by ostensibly neutral publications from the civil service – be sceptical.”
A Scottish Government spokesperson said: "The Achievement of Curriculum for Excellence Levels are official statistics that are subject to the usual quality assurance processes. They rely on the judgement of Scotland’s highly trained teachers, and the Scottish Government trusts our teachers.
"The latest figures show positive progress. Pupils reaching expected levels of literacy and numeracy are at the highest level on record, whilst the poverty-related attainment gap has narrowed to a record low at all levels.”
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