SNP's shame over widening gap between rich and poor pupils is now an annual event

Opening up exam results is a moment of high tension for all but the most confident of students. So it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like for the roughly 7,000 young people who received the long-awaited email, only to discover a blank message.

Most would have realised it was the technical glitch that the Scottish Qualifications Authority would later apologise for. Anyone who has lived in Scotland for long enough has come to expect almost anything touched by the blundering hand of our government to go wrong.

However, perhaps for a moment, some students may have feared that no results meant exactly that: they’d failed the lot and were now being cruelly trolled by the SQA. As an error, it seems symbolic of Scottish education’s declining status. Of course, this wasn’t the only bad news.

Fewer pupils took exams in science subjects, with biology down 7.2 per cent, physics down 3.1 and chemistry down 1.4, while there were big rises in PE (up 17.9), modern studies (up 14.4) and geography (up 10.3). Given the importance of science to the economy, this is a worrying sign, particularly if it becomes a trend.

However the most high-profile problem was that the attainment gap – the difference in performance between rich and poor students – once again grew wider. For Highers, it was 17.2 per cent, a record high, up from 16 last year and 14.9 in 2022. This is the same attainment gap that the SNP pledged to close.

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It should be uncontroversial to say that every child, regardless of the circumstances of their birth, deserves an equal chance of doing well in school. The widening of the attainment gap provides evidence that, under the SNP government, a child of wealthy parents is enjoying, through no fault of their own, an increasingly large advantage relative to a child growing up in deprived circumstances.

This country is becoming less fair, less equal. And, more than this important but intangible loss, by failing the poorest students, rather than enabling them to reach their full potential, Scotland is impoverishing itself.