The Scottish Government

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Footnotes

1. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2006/09/13155926/0
2. The defining characteristics of pre-school education are:
   
   the provision of a broad range of planned learning opportunities, in line with the Curriculum Framework for Children 3-5, which support the development of the whole child;
   
   evidence that the needs of individual children are attended to, and that their progress is monitored and recorded in order to inform the next stages of learning, including the move to primary school.
3. Children in Scotland must start primary school in the August term after their fifth birthday. However, education authorities can make arrangements for children to start in the August when they are four, if they will turn five by the end of February. This generally means that children start school when they are aged between four-and-a-half and five-and-a-half.
4. The fact that population size, unless extremely small, has no bearing on the precision of estimated proportions means that reporting authorities of very different sizes nevertheless require the same pupil sample sizes to achieve the same degree of estimation precision.
5. In practice, since the SSA pupil samples had to support separate attainment reporting by authority in more than one curriculum area, viz. reading and numeracy, the 450 pupils were divided between the two types of assessment, with the consequence that margins of error were closer to seven percentage points than to five.

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