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Listen

The Gaelic schools, teachers and pupils

Of the 44 schools/units initially identified as potentially containing pupils studying science through the medium of Gaelic, four reported that they had no such pupils in that school year. Four others declined the invitation to participate in the survey; one did not reply to the invitation, another was moving to a new campus, a third was experiencing staffing problems, and a fourth reported that pupils were taught bilingually in the upper stages. There remained 36 schools/units expressing a willingness to participate in the survey, four at P5 only (having no eligible P7 pupils) and 32 at both P5 and P7. The numbers of eligible P5 and P7 pupils in these schools varied from 1 to 27 for P5 and from 1 to 19 at P7, totalling 231 and 186 at P5 and P7, respectively. In the event, two of the agreed schools that had pupils at both stages did not participate - one participated at P5 only, while the other failed to submit level judgements or to return completed test booklets for either stage. This left 35 participating schools at P5 and, among these, 30 at P7, giving a total of 226 pupils at P5 and 179 at P7.

Questionnaires were completed by 40 P5 teachers in 34 of the Gaelic schools/units and 33 P7 teachers in 28 of the schools/units. In their demographics the teachers were very similar to their colleagues nationally ². The majority (80%) were female, around 70% had been teaching for more than five years, and just over 40% had been in their current post that long (around 20% were in a new post that year). Virtually all spent up to five hours a week teaching science, and over 90% claimed to spend up to five hours a week in preparation. Over 90% of the teachers taught science themselves; a specialist teacher taught science in 9% of the classes (5% at P5, 12% at P7), and none of the classes were taught science by an external specialist teacher.

Among the various enquiries in the teachers' questionnaire, one was unique to the Gaelic-medium survey. This explored the extent to which Gaelic was indeed the language of instruction in science lessons. Of the 72 teachers who responded to the general questionnaire, 56 also responded to this particular enquiry. Table 1 provides the findings, principal among them being the greater frequency of listening and talking in Gaelic compared with reading and writing in this language in science lessons.

Table 1
The degree to which Gaelic featured in science lessons
(% teachers giving each response: 33 P5 and 23 P7 teachers)

Of the pupils that should have been tested in the 35 participating schools, six P5s and three P7s were recorded as being absent during the testing session, while three P5 pupils had been withdrawn from testing by their schools - one before the event and two during testing. In total, 192 P5 pupils and 166 P7 pupils were actually tested, these numbers representing 85% and 93%, respectively, of the possible maximum in each case (226 P5, 179 P7). At P5 the sample ratio of boys to girls was 44:56, compared with 45:55 at P7. In the P5 sample just under 8% of the pupils were 'most deprived' compared with just under 7% in the P7 sample (where 'most deprived' means pupils living in one of the 20% most deprived areas of Scotland as identified by the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation). Without detailed information about the pupil populations, it is not possible to comment definitively on the degree to which the pupils tested were fully representative. This should be borne in mind when test and questionnaire results are presented for the pupils that participated.

The results of the language choice policy are interesting (Table 2). Of the 192 tested P5 pupils, 39% chose both booklets in English, 50% chose both booklets in Gaelic, with the rest (11%) choosing one booklet in each language. Corresponding percentages for P7 are 45%, 42% and 13%, respectively. Of the pupils choosing uniquely English-language booklets, virtually all at P5 (97%) and all at P7 answered uniquely in English. Of the pupils choosing uniquely Gaelic booklets, 74% at P5 and 66% at P7 answered uniquely in Gaelic, most (all at P7) of the rest responding to some tasks in Gaelic and some in English. There is no evidence that any one booklet was favoured over the other for a particular language choice.

Table 2
The booklet language selected by the pupils
(% pupils categorised in terms of their booklet language choices)

We cannot say whether these patterns of language choice result from independent pupil choices, or teacher-guided choices. But there were certainly schools and units in which all the pupils favoured one language over the other (Table 3). Overall, around half the schools/units (47% at P5, 53% at P7) were ones in which all or most of the pupils chose English-language test booklets and responded in English, and one-third (36% at P5, 31% at P7) were ones in which all or most of the pupils chose Gaelic-language booklets and responded in Gaelic or in a mixture of Gaelic and English.

Table 3
The language profiles of the schools/units
(% schools/units categorized in terms of the booklet language choices of their pupils)

These results are entirely in line with the expectation that many of the pupils in the Gaelic-medium survey would probably not have been receiving their science education entirely through the medium of Gaelic.

As in the main survey, completed test booklets were returned by the schools to SQA for processing. The booklets were not directly marked. Instead, pupils' responses to the various tasks within each booklet were transcribed onto specially designed keying sheets, and the keyed data were later machine marked. This strategy has the advantage of providing a rich source of qualitative information about the way that pupils responded to questions, complementing the quantitative mark information. There was one important difference in the way that the Gaelic pupils' booklets were processed in comparison with the tens of thousands of completed test booklets furnished by the main survey. This is that the Gaelic pupils' responses were transcribed by practising Gaelic-speaking primary teachers, whereas those of the English main survey pupils were not transcribed by teachers. This difference should be borne in mind when the attainment results are presented, since the transcription of responses to open-ended questions typically requires a degree of judgement when deciding on the most appropriate response codes.

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