Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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Question 453: To ask the Minister for Education and Science the progress in regard to the commitment given in the programme for Government to ensure that all children are tested in literacy and numeracy at two stages during their primary school education. [18424/08]

Batt O'Keeffe (Cork North West, Fianna Fail)
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My Department issued Circular 0138/2006 in December 2006 to primary schools requesting that they ensure that standardised testing is implemented on an annual basis for all pupils in English reading and Mathematics at the end of first class or the beginning of second class, and at the end of fourth class or the beginning of fifth class, beginning in the calendar year 2007.

The introduction of the measure was supported by a national programme of teacher professional development in assessment for learning. Grants of €1.65m and €1.7m issued to schools in December 2006 and December 2007 for the cost of test materials, teachers' manuals, test scoring services or test-related software. It is intended that the implementation of standardised testing at school level will be complemented by a separate programme of national monitoring so that national trends in different categories of school can be tracked over time. Schools in the DEIS programme have already been sampled by the Educational Research Centre for this purpose, and the sample of non-Deis English and Irish medium schools is planned for 2009.

Guidelines on assessment developed by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment were published in October 2007 to assist schools in developing and implementing a policy on assessment practice in classrooms and on reporting to parents. The guidelines also provide teachers with information on what to assess in individual subjects of the Primary School Curriculum and how to use assessment information to plan for children's future learning in that subject.

National report card templates for recording and reporting data on pupils' attainment to parents will be available on the NCCA website shortly.