Judgement day should beckon for John Swinney and Nicola Sturgeon over Scots exams scandal - Brian Monteith

John Swinney and Nicola Sturgeon are culpable of gross negligence in their handling of the 2020 Scottish exams, not because they personally assessed or moderated grades but because they did not live up to the standards they set for their predecessors and themselves.

On the morning of 10 August, exactly twenty years ago today, a BBC journalist called me to ask if I had a comment about the fast evolving scandal of the 2000 Scottish exam results.

The carnage that was unravelling included thousands of pupils who received either the wrong results or no results at all for their “Higher” exams. Similarly, some schools were sent no information of how their pupils and performed and could not offer any help or advice. Eventually, some 147,000 results had to be revalidated by the Scottish Qualifications Authority and it emerged that over 4,000 pupils received the wrong Standard Grade results too.

I was the Conservative education spokesman at the time and a member of the Scottish Parliament’s Education Committee – also on that committee was the SNP’s education spokeswoman, Nicola Sturgeon.

The personal distress that the catastrophic failure of the SQA to administer that year’s diet of the exams cannot be minimised. I met many pupils that had to change what they had expected to study at school or university the next year or the career path they had dreamt of. At the very least there was months of immense anxiety for pupils and parents – as well as teachers who felt powerless to help.

The seismic scale of such a huge administrative failure in what remained at the time Scotland’s flagship public service – for our education system was still given a great deal of international respect – should also not be underestimated.

It was the first real test of the greater scrutiny and accountability that devolution was meant to bring. Parliament was, however, in recess. Information about what had exactly happened at the SQA and why, and to what extent Sam Galbraith and his junior minister, Peter Peacock, were themselves culpable, was not yet clear and mostly anecdotal. Yet It did not take long for Nicola Sturgeon to call for Galbraith’s resignation, saying within days Galbraith was, “out of touch, out of his depth and should be out of office”.

I remember taking a more restrained approach, arguing initially that Sam Galbraith would know himself if he had done enough to avert the crisis but meantime we should await evidence of what had actually happened.

The Education Secretary started to make commitments to solve the problems, with firm dates and assurances given to about how he would intervene to resolve the problems – but, crucially, he did not meet them. As a result of these failures and the growing loss of credibility on 10 September I lodged a parliamentary motion of no confidence in the Education Secretary – on the basis of his poor handling of the crisis, as opposed to the causes of the crisis, which were to be the subject of the Education Committee’s subsequent inquiry.

Nicola Sturgeon and her SNP colleagues chose to vote with Labour and the Liberal Democrats against even hearing the motion of no confidence. The test of scrutiny and accountability then passed to the Education Committee which, given its inbuilt Scottish Executive majority, unsurprisingly admonished Sam Galbraith, who by the time its report was published had moved on to become the Environment Secretary. The SNP did then propose a no-confidence motion in December, that the Conservatives supported, but it was essentially perfunctory and of no consequence, and was of course lost.

Out of respect I should record that throughout this difficult period for Sam Galbraith when I was undoubtedly adding pressure to what was a highly-stressed period I always found him courteous, helpful to me and, I believe, honourable. We could disagree robustly about what he might have done but it never appeared personal or rancorous – there was still civility in Scottish politics, and it was a better place for it.

Fast forward to now and we have another SQA exam crisis – but the context it is set within is quite different. The failings cannot this time be distanced at arms-length by Ministers blaming the SQA – the Education Secretary John Swinney is up to his arms in the decision making and is fully complicit. These were not administrative failings but public policy decisions that Ministers are meant to be accountable for.

Fault cannot be found with the SQA’s computer software nor with missing test papers, nor with the teething troubles of the new “Higher Still” exam certificate – all of which contributed to the problems in 2000. The truth is the SQA’s systems appear to have worked according to plan – those in charge, including the Education Secretary and the First Minister – were fully conversant with what outcomes were expected and agreed to the procedures going ahead.

It is therefore right that Labour has moved a motion of no confidence in John Swinney; there is no need to wait on any parliamentary or Audit Scotland inquiry before summoning him to defend himself. Swinney’s failure is a political failure in accepting the astonishing policy – despite warnings – that the model to moderate the outcome of teachers assessing their own pupils while exams are suspended would mean downgrading a pupil’s proposed grades on the basis of a school’s past performance – and that this would mean that some able pupils in schools with poor results in the past would be disadvantaged through no fault of their own.

This is doubly cruel, for such pupils and the teachers who helped them have in the end had to overcome the historical difficulties of low expectations and many other disadvantages – only to find they still lose out because of the low expectations of the Ministers’ agreed policy.

What makes this additionally absurd is that the resolution of this unjust system is that the pupils affected are told by the First Minister to appeal their results – resulting in teachers reviewing the outcomes when it is teachers that have had their assessments, which are then moderated by colleagues have already been rejected by the SQA.

In 2000 Donald Dewar had no liability for the SQA or Sam Galbraith’s decisions – but in 2020 Nicola Sturgeon is liable, having approved Swinney’s policy. Further – she has stated she would her neck is on the line and should be judged by education outcomes.

Well now we can see she and John Swinney have failed. Judgement day beckons.

Brian Monteith is Editor of ThinkScotland.org