Shameful SQA might as well have told her to ‘know her place’ - Dani Garavelli

With or without Covid-19, the past few years of secondary school are tough on children. Our exams-obsessed system forces them onto a treadmill of homework, assessments and supported study designed less to bring out the best in them as individuals than to ensure they leave with a clutch of certificates that will reflect well on them, their parents, their schools and, let’s not forget, the Scottish Government.

Olivia Biggart's dreams of going to medical school have been 'destroyed'

It’s a system that - at its worst - reduces education to high-stake hoop-jumping and pupils to commodities, whose worth can be measured in the number of As, Bs and Cs accrued in a single column on an email marked National 5 or Higher.

And it’s a system that favours the well-off. Of course it does. Pupils whose parents can afford to buy houses in the catchment areas of “top-performing” schools; who will happily fork out for books and music lessons and tutors to ensure their children keep up in class. It is these students who are photographed jumping for joy, while holding their clean sheet of As aloft, every single results day.

The educational divide begins at nursery. One report last year showed 59 per cent of P7 children from the most deprived areas met the standard expected in literacy compared with 83 per cent in the least deprived. Another revealed pupils in affluent areas were more likely to leave school with five Highers than those in deprived areas were to leave school with one. The Scottish Government has been talking about narrowing the attainment gap for the duration of its time in power to little effect.

In this respect last week’s debacle was entirely predictable. With no exam papers to mark, the SQA was tasked with devising a system that would mirror previous years’ results, and this it did with aplomb.

The fact it had to override the estimates of teachers who were the best judges of their pupils’ abilities, and disproportionately downgrade the results of pupils from deprived areas in order to replicate existing social disadvantage, just exposed to public glare how entrenched that social disadvantage is.

The SQA’s moderation process treated children like points on a bell curve. In all, 133,000 results - a quarter of all predicted grades - were altered, 93 per cent of them downwards. Because schools in deprived areas tend to be “lower performing”, their pupils were disproportionately affected. According to the SQA’s own figures, the poorest pupils had their Higher pass rates reduced by 15.2 per cent , the richest by just 6.9 per cent .

The statistics are stark, but it’s the individual injustices that hit home: pupils handed results lower than their prelims; entire classes downgraded from Cs to Ds. Hard work nullified, futures circumscribed; dreams quashed.

A tough time in so many young people’s lives made worse, and for what? To satisfy some algorithm. To make sure this year’s results retained “credibility”.

But what credibility is there in a system which so blatantly discriminates against the already disadvantaged? What credibility is there in a system that decides Olivia Biggart - who got seven As in her National 5s; who was predicted to get five As in her Highers - should make do with two As and three Bs because the school she goes to doesn’t have a track record of producing high fliers? No amount of studying for the UCAT test will get her into medicine with those results. The SQA might as well have told her to know her f***ing place.

So how did the Scottish government respond to this scandal? It has staked its reputation on education so it must have been shame-faced, right? Or apologetic? Or resolute in its commitment to address this travesty? But no. Education Secretary John Swinney was sanguine about the whole affair. If the results had not been moderated, there would have been a 14 point rise in the Higher pass rate, he said, and what an outcry that would have caused.

With atypical chutzpah, he saw a slight decrease in the National 5 attainment gap as a reason for self-congratulation. Finally, he fell back on the appeals system as a mechanism to right any wrongs.

To say Swinney misread the public mood is to put it mildly. Though opposition leaders have sought to capitalise - as opposition leaders will - the outrage is real, not manufactured and transcends party politics. The calls for a vote of no confidence are not without justification.

So much of what Swinney said was misjudged. Appeals exist to deal with aberrations, not to fix a broken process. How is the SQA going to cope with tens of thousands of them? And why should pupils - who have already been failed - be placed under further pressure because the Scottish government failed to avert a crisis it had been repeatedly warned about?

As for the question of parity: no amount of SQA wand-waving is going to make the experience of this year’s National 5 and Higher students the same as their predecessors. Through no fault of their own, they will always be the “pandemic” cohort, in receipt of results based on non-existent exams, destined never to know how they would have fared if they had actually sat them.

Would people *really* have cared so much if the SQA had decided to err on the side of optimism, and if the grades had jumped significantly - for one year only - as a result? Or if - for once - a handful of pupils in deprived areas were given the leg-up their more affluent peers take for granted? I am struggling to picture past pupils fulminating over the possibility that their passes, obtained in happier times, would be devalued by a grade inflation caused by Covid-19. Don’t most of us accept this year is anything but normal?

As for universities faced with a larger-than-usual crop of applicants with the requisite grades, they could have treated it as a “teachable moment”. Picking students almost entirely on the basis of their exam results has always been sub-optimal, taking no account of the rounded individual. A more imaginative, holistic approach might encourage a greater proportion of working class students and mitigate against the high drop-out rate from “top” schools where pupils have been taught to pass exams rather than to think for themselves.

But that’s true of every aspect of this fiasco. While terrible, the pandemic has offered an opportunity for us to reflect on the way we live. If this is possible for employers, who have, inadvertently, discovered the benefits of more flexible working practices, why couldn’t it have been possible for schools?

Why couldn’t the Scottish government have said: “We know the existing system reinforces inequality, for years we have expressed our commitment to change it, here is a chance to do something different: to think big, take risks, come up with something new?” Instead - to head off criticism from the likes of the Daily Mail - it strove to preserve rather than reform its discriminatory nature. In doing so, it allowed the children it purports to cherish to be treated like ciphers, statistics, bricks in the wall.

As the old saying goes: it let the pupils down, it let the teachers down, it let the schools down, but, most of all, it let itself down.