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Nicola Sturgeon asked to be judged on her record on education and the SNP have been in charge of our fully devolved Scottish education system for roughly 10 years.

Responsibility for the educational outcomes we’re now seeing must lie with the SNP – and the trend in those outcomes is simply terrible, as Education and Skills Secretary John Swinney has had to admit.

Scotland participates in one international benchmark survey on educational attainment, the three-yearly PISA study.

PISA surveys 15-year-old pupils, so the most recent data (for 2015) was the first chance to see how pupils who had spent significant time in an SNP-run education system were faring, as these pupils had been in the Scottish education system for seven years under an SNP administration.

Graphs 1, 2 & 3 show that since the SNP came to power, in each of the three main disciplines as measured by PISA – reading, mathematics and science – Scotland’s performance has declined significantly.

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(Image: Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy (SSLN))

This is true in absolute terms, relative to the whole of the UK and relative to the average for all OECD countries.

In maths and reading, where Scottish pupils used to perform significantly better than UK students overall, latest available data shows we’ve dropped back to average at best.

In science, where Scottish pupils used to perform in line with the UK average, their performance in the most recent survey is very significantly worse.

In all three disciplines, we’ve gone from outperforming the OECD average to being distinctly average.

If you were to look at our performance in international league table format, in all three subject areas we’ve dropped below the UK and OECD averages and into the bottom half of the table.

As the Scottish Government make clear: “PISA is the major international study of pupil performance in which Scotland participates.” It is their chosen method of benchmarking our educational attainment.

(Image: Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy (SSLN))

In fact, having withdrawn from the other globally recognised assessment body in 2011, it’s the only data we have to compare our performance on an international basis.

This is good quality data and the results are a damning indictment of the SNP’s performance as custodians of our education system.

The other way we have been able to objectively assess the performance over time of our education system is the Scottish Government-run Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy (SSLN).

This data provides worrying evidence of declining performance and wide (and in some cases widening) attainment gaps between the performance of pupils from the most-deprived and least-deprived backgrounds.

To illustrate: Graph 4 looks at numeracy performance and the attainment gap for primary four pupils (aged seven and eight) – standards are dropping and the gap is growing.

(Image: Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy (SSLN))

Graph 5 looks at writing performance for S2 (13 to 14-year-old) pupils – overall performance is declining dramatically and the attainment gap remains large.

There’s a lot more in the SSLN data. For example, only 40 per cent of pupils are judged to be performing “well” or “very well” in numeracy. Is our education system producing a generation, soon to vote, who aren’t great at adding up?

But there’s no danger of the SNP being embarrassed by the next set of SSLN data, because they’ve simply decided to stop the survey altogether.

They justify this by saying that because it’s survey based, the data doesn’t provide useful information at a school or local authority level.

That’s a ridiculous argument because that was never what the survey was intended to do.

SSLN gives an overall assessment of the quality of literacy and numeracy education in Scotland, and it does that well.

(Image: Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy (SSLN))

The Scottish Government commissioned the OECD to write a report, Improving Schools in Scotland: An OECD Perspective. That report cites the SSLN data 27 times and at no point suggests the data is in any way not fit-for-purpose.

It’s hard not to conclude that the SNP’s decision to stop the SSLN survey is motivated by the fact that it exposes failings on their part – and that they’re fearful of what the next ones might show. Do you think they’d scrap it if they thought upcoming surveys were going to show how successful their reforms have been?

It gets worse. The Scottish Government state: “New statistics on literacy and numeracy performance will be available annually from the teacher professional judgment data collection.”

So not only are we losing the ability to track performance versus prior years on a like-for-like basis, we’re moving from largely objective test-based measurements to subjective measures “based on teachers’ professional judgments”.

It’s almost as if the SNP are going out of the way to avoid being judged objectively on their performance.

Combine the SSLN findings with the PISA results and a clear picture emerges – on the SNP’s watch, overall standards in Scottish education have dropped and pupils from the most-deprived areas are the ones suffering the most. When grilled on this topic by Andrew Neil during a recent BBC interview, Sturgeon offered a masterclass in political spin.

(Image: Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy (SSLN))

She brushed off references to the latest available international benchmark data (reflecting seven years of SNP control) as “from two years ago” and airily dismissed her own Government’s survey of more than 10,000 pupils as somehow irrelevant.

She even went on to argue that “there’s real progress been made”. To justify this, she fired out a barrage of stats on exam passes and “tariff scores”.

Both of these are crude measures which suffer from obvious weaknesses when used to judge the performance of our education system.

There is no robust way to adjust for the issue of “grade inflation” (lowering pass marks) and the mix of exams taken, but more importantly these are measures of the end of the educational pipeline. If, for example, there are issues with numeracy at primary four (as the SSLN survey suggests), we need to know about it now, not wait until those pupils leave school in eight or nine years’ time.

The other measure seized on by Sturgeon is the number of pupils leaving school for “positive destinations”.

(Image: Getty Images)

This basically means not ending up unemployed or in jail – so if your kids leave school for a minimum wage job on a zero-hours contract, our First Minister celebrates that as having achieved a “positive destination”.

The SNP would of course like to blame “Westminster austerity” for these failings but that doesn’t wash. The PISA scores show this is an issue specific to Scotland.

The reality, as revealed in the Scottish Government’s own GERS figures, is the SNP have cut spending on education and training over the last nine years by on average eight per cent more than it has been cut in the rest of the UK.

Over the same period, teacher numbers in Scotland have declined by eight per cent and class sizes have increased by six per cent. The reverse has happened in England, with teacher numbers and class sizes improving by four per cent.

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The SNP – not “Westminster austerity” – are to blame for failures to invest appropriately in Scotland’s education system.

There can be few greater responsibilities for a government than to ensure its country’s children receive the best possible education, to provide the next generation with the best chances to succeed in life.

Tony Blair swept to power in 1997 promising to make “education, education, education” his top priorities.

The Scottish education system appears to be suffering the effects of having an SNP Government in power with “independence, independence, independence” as theirs.

Young Scots emerging from education with reduced life chances are the ones paying the price for the SNP’s failings today.

The question is, will the SNP start paying the price at the ballot box?

The first thing to say is that the data here isn’t in question – it has been lifted from official reports produced by either the OECD or the Scottish Government.

What is needed – what is always needed – is some context.

Take PISA, for example, which is certainly not without its problems.

Back in 2014, dozens of academics and educationalists from around the world signed an open letter criticising various aspects of the system, such as a focus on the “economic role of public schools” and the potential financial conflict of interest at the heart of the PISA model.

They also warned, entirely correctly, that the rankings have “caused a shift of attention to short-term fixes designed to help a country quickly climb the rankings, despite research showing that enduring changes in education practice take decades, not a few years, to come to fruition”.

In 2015, Pasi Sahlberg and Andy Hargreaves – both hugely respected educationalists – also weighed in on the issue.

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They pointed out there are significant concerns about how PISA data is collected, processed and presented. They argued that “in educational and moral terms, the tower of PISA is not only leaning, but in danger of toppling over completely”.

So, although PISA has done good things for global education – not least by highlighting the folly of market-driven reforms or the importance of tackling inequality – it is a very long way from being perfectly reliable.

Kevin is right to say that the SSLN gives us a good picture of literacy and numeracy in Scotland but, once again, some caveats apply.

Firstly, the nature of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) means that assessing pupils who are performing “well or very well” is not an exact science, and those in the next category – who are, after all, “working within” the expected level – are not necessarily underperforming.

I am therefore not convinced that it is especially helpful to attempt to use SSLN data as an overall measurement of the attainment gap.

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Another potential issue is that presenting the information in this graphic form might lead readers to believe that the performance of S2 pupils is particularly abysmal.

In reality, those pupils are being measured relative to benchmarks designed for S3 pupils so are, in effect, being assessed a year early.

It is also worth noting that the data for S2 writing is gathered and presented in a different way from that for reading, making it impossible to draw clear or simple conclusions based on this information alone.

As with PISA, however, these potential problems with some of the information don’t change the downward trends.

SSLN data certainly suggests that the gap between the most-deprived and least-deprived children is, at best, not being closed.

It also raises real concerns, shared by teachers, about literacy and numeracy in schools.

We shouldn’t ignore this data but we shouldn’t allow it to suck us into panicked, knee-jerk reactions either.

Finally, it is important to understand that education does not exist in a vacuum.

(Image: Jane Barlow/PA Wire)

It is not credible to dismiss broader social and economic factors when attempting to examine the problems in our schools.

This is especially relevant in Scotland because the switch to CfE – which makes much greater demands of teachers than the system it replaced – would have been a hugely ambitious and difficult project at the best of times, but we ended up trying to do it in the aftermath of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.

To make matters worse, we then had to cope with a disastrous programme of austerity which made things much, much worse.

We already know the impact that poverty has on schooling – contrary to what most people tend to believe, schools are only able to influence a relatively small proportion of the factors affecting a child’s educational performance.

More than a quarter of kids in this country now live in relative poverty and 50,000 children in the country use food banks.

(Image: 2017 Getty Images)

Families everywhere are struggling to cope with precarious and low-paid employment which puts everyone, especially children, under enormous strain.

Even with Scottish Government mitigation in areas like the bedroom tax, cuts to welfare and the application of punitive sanctions have done significant social damage.

All of this has, as ever, disproportionately affected those with the least.

The challenges associated with all of this were then magnified by problems with the design and implementation of CfE, plummeting teacher numbers and a culture of increasing accountability and bureaucracy.

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Schools, teachers, parents and pupils were left in the middle of a perfect storm from which we are yet to emerge.

Ultimately, it’s only down to the incredible work of Scotland’s teachers that the situation isn’t far worse.

SNP education policy is without doubt a significant part of our problem but the big picture of Scottish education is about much more than just the failures of Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond’s governments.

None of this means that the data on this page is incorrect or even invalid.

But we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that it is just one part of a very large and almost uniquely complex picture.

● You can see a full set of graphs for P4, P7 and S2 for numeracy, writing and reading at www.chokkablog.blogspot.co.uk