NICOLA Sturgeon has defended standardised testing for primary one pupils, saying they are vital for raising standards and closing the attainment gap.

The assessments were raised at First Minister’s Questions, with Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard calling the tests “flawed” and telling MSPs they were responsible for leaving kids in tears.

In a surreal moment, Leonard started off his set of questions by asking if Sturgeon could “give us another word for a hummingbird’s beak”.

“Not immediately, no,” the First Minister replied.

“That is rather unfortunate, because the hummingbird’s beak question is one of the government’s standardised assessment literacy questions for five-year-olds,” he said.

Leonard added “The educational charity Upstart says these tests are not only pointless and highly counterproductive, worse they are an adverse childhood experience.”

The Labour leader said the testing regime, which involves standardised assessments in literacy and numeracy for P1, P4, P7 and S3, had been “flawed from the very start”, delivered late and over budget.

He cited one Edinburgh teacher who said administering the tests to her school’s 54 P1 children took approximately 30 hours of teacher time for numeracy and 40 hours for literacy, but had not delivered reliable information on the children’s learning and development.

The results of assessments saw children put into high, medium and low categories.

“Out of our 54 children, not one child came out as low on the numeracy test, even though some of them only gave a handful of correct answers,” the teacher said in a letter to Labour’s Iain Gray.

He also described the problems with the design and the functionality of the testing, and the phrasing of the questions, which, they suggested, seemed likely to confuse most five year olds.

Replying to Leonard, the First Minister said: “We are determined as I have said on so many occasions to continue to raise standards in our schools and to close the attainment gap, and being able to assess in an appropriate and age appropriate way how our young people are doing in school is an important part of that.

“We will continue to work hard to make sure we do that, and we will do that in a way that is appropriate.”

She added: “We will continue to listen to teachers and we will continue to consider the feedback of teachers.

“The vast majority of teacher feedback as I understand it has been positive about the depth of the diagnostic information available.

“The assessments are not high stakes assessments, there is not a pass or a fail.

“They are one part of a range of evidence that a teacher will gather on a child or young person’s progress.”