Achievement of Curriculum for Excellence Levels [Draft]

The data are provided to Scottish Government by local authorities and grant-aided schools. Independent schools are not included in the annual data collection. The assessments of children's progress are based on teachers' professional judgements in schools.

Teacher professional judgements of achievement of a level are based on all of the evidence collected by teachers during the ongoing assessment of children and young people's learning. A wide range of evidence is collected in a variety of ways. This includes observing children and young people at work, assessing their work in class, standardised assessments and assessing children and young people's knowledge and understanding by talking to them about their learning.

The data collected cover all pupils in Primary 1, Primary 4, Primary 7 and Secondary 3 in mainstream schools and all pupils based in special schools/units. Teacher judgements cover the four organisers of reading, writing, listening and talking and numeracy.

Special schools and standalone special units cater for children of all ages. The information gathered as part of the ACEL return does not include a specific stage for these pupils (i.e. they are simply recorded as being a pupil based in a special school or standalone special unit and not as being in P1, P4, etc.).