Scotland’s exams fiasco exposes its bitter educational divide

Alterations to Scottish high-school exam results have disproportionately harmed promising students from struggling schools. That is the verdict among critics of the SQA’s “adjustment” process, which has downgraded over 120,000 results in line with government grading targets.

The fiasco does not bode well for the government’s commitment to meritocracy. The methodology used to determine adjustments involved subjecting entire schools to the yardstick of their past performance: students from poor-performing centres were levelled down while academically successful schools – especially independents – have remained safe. In a minority of cases, poor-performing students have benefited from their institutions’ reputation with an upgrade to their results. It’s a bitter injustice and an insult to social mobility.

Those who have lost out are the outliers: talented students in bad catchment areas attending schools with historically poor performance. For those in the bottom fifth of the socio-economic scale, according to SQA figures, the proportion of passes was reduced by 15.2%, whereas pass rates were reduced by only 6.2% for the top fifth. Individual cases such as that of Olivia Biggart, 16, in Motherwell, whose dreams of a medical career have been abruptly shattered, have been well publicised. Twitter is rife with anger from teenagers and education professionals.

John Swinney, Education Minister, denies the system has been unfair, but has conceded that some “young people feel that they haven’t had the result that they deserve to get.”

The bureaucratic tweaking came from a government rightly concerned about grade inflation. Teacher recommendations are a subjective process which, though supposedly grounded in preliminary and past examination results, leave students’ assessments open to parental elbow-wrenching. The SNP has remained robust in its defence, with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon raising “a real credibility issue” with the prospect of using teachers’ predicted grades without adjusting for institutional differences. She told a conference that students can use a free appeals service to contest their results, which may provide redress in the coming weeks.

The effort to keep a lid on grade inflation failed, however, insofar as pass rates at National 5 (GCSE equivalent) and Higher (AS equivalent) are still higher than in previous years.

The problem lies in the new distribution of those pass rates, which lays bare the extent of institutional inequality among Scottish schools, and exam boards’ incapacity to manage them with any nuance. The subjection of talented individuals – especially outliers among their peers and in their school’s history – to a blunt bureaucratic stick is hard to defend. It presents a crippling blow to the meritocratic myth which underpins the national education system.

Nor does the controversy bode well for results in the rest of the UK, due out this month. They have been subject to the same statistical manipulations. In a video for schools and stakeholders, Ofqual has offered assurance that “the model will ensure that results are broadly in line with previous years” achieved by “comparing the centre’s grades with the centre’s historical results”. As of June, dissatisfied students will also have the option to re-sit exams in August. But with the law of averages remaining supreme, some students must prepare for disappointment.

All of this poses a headache, too, for university admissions teams. A promising rise in state-school intakes at the Red Bricks over the past decade will undoubtedly receive a dent this year through no fault of their own. The decision to keep children in most years at home for months may also set admissions targets off course for years to come.

The situation reminds us that the pandemic has not been a social leveller. The scale of educational inequality has been laid bare. My own old school in Edinburgh, independent, has an active social media account which I have perused occasionally over lockdown; members of the junior orchestra were arranging performances of Viva la Vida which they had practised and performed together at home with their teachers; students presented language and cooking and drawing projects on video, from home. This is a significantly rosier picture than that facing the majority of Scottish pupils.

This week’s exam results will be a blow to many. But the deeper consequences will only be apparent in the years to come, as the institutional and social landscape exposes the cost of lockdown on young people’s aspirations.