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Section 8 of the Islands (Scotland) Act 2018 introduces Island Communities Impact Assessments and is part of a number of provisions covering duties in relation to island communities. Work is currently underway on the guidance and secondary legislation related to these provisions and once this has been completed the provisions will be brought into force. This will be discussed with the leadership of each local authority of the forthcoming Islands Strategic Group on 4 October 2018.

The SNSA are diagnostic assessments designed to identify next steps in learning for children and young people. Identifying strengths or concerns about a child’s digital skills are very much part of everyday learning and teaching, as are the SNSA. The User Review highlights the concern about digital skills and in some instances questions have been re-designed or replaced. To minimise the range of digital skills required by young children, there has also been a reduction in the number of drag and drop type questions. This does not impact on the diagnostic value of the questions but will have a positive impact by making the assessment more user friendly.

The Scottish Government fully recognises these concerns and is taking steps through the system enhancements announced in the User Review published on 28 August to help ensure that the experience for all children and young people is positive. Under no circumstance should a child feel distressed or upset. If 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 the child is asked to do.

We do not have specific figures on this feedback which came from the focus groups with teachers. As part of the User Review, there will be more systematic means of gathering teacher feedback from 2018-19 onwards. Teachers will have the opportunity to offer feedback at any time from within the system, thus providing a simple and direct means to report their views and experience. In addition, an annual survey of users will be introduced to collect feedback from a randomly sampled group of staff to provide an overview of the SNSA experience.

The Scottish Government reflected on the comments from EIS members and others as part of our User Review of the SNSA. As the User Review makes clear, a number of enhancements are being made to the SNSA system as a result of the comments received.

The Scottish Government has made clear that it will not gather or publish any data from the Scottish National Standardised Assessments in order to compare schools. School level Achievement of CfE Level results, based on teachers’ professional judgement, are published along with other school level data.

The Scottish Government recognises that there are differing views on the reports generated by the SNSA system. One teacher commented that “Data is incredibly detailed and personalised. Feedback will be very useful in looking for next steps.” We will continue to look to enhance SNSA reports to ensure they are well matched to Curriculum for Excellence and provide high quality information for teachers.

The Scottish National Standardised Assessments are adaptive assessments and can only be provided online. It was a key requirement in the development of the SNSA that the online system is compatible with a wide variety of technical platforms, devices and internet bandwidth connectivity available within Scottish local authorities and schools. No concerns were raised by local authority representatives or professional organisations about IT capability, in large part because most schools already have the necessary capability and capacity given that they have undertaken existing standardised assessments on digital platforms for some time.

As set out in the User Review, Scottish Government and Education Scotland officials held a number of focus groups with teachers and observed a number of children and young people carrying out the assessments and discussed their experience with their teachers. It was clear from these sessions that, overall, the children involved enjoyed the assessments.

This is feedback from the Accessibility Advisory Group, as well as from training events with ASN staff and discussions with local authorities. The Accessibility Advisory Group contains practitioners, local authorities and organisations involved in ASN such as Call Scotland.