What’s apparent from this year’s Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) results is that, when it comes to assessment, Scotland is edging ever closer to the regime that existed prior to the pandemic.
Today’s results demonstrate this. Pass rates are getting closer to pre-Covid norms and the attainment gap has widened on last year - at Higher, it is within a percentage point of that recorded in 2019.
In 2019, the attainment gap at Higher was 16.9 percentage points; this year it was 16.
What’s more, the SQA has made clear that Covid-driven modifications to assessment will end in 2023-24, with coursework returning for most subjects and exams making a comeback in practical subjects.
While next year was supposed to be the final time qualifications were presided over by the SQA, education secretary Jenny Gilruth’s decision in June to consult more widely before moving forward with reform means we no longer have even an indicative timeline for change.
Depending on your perspective, this either means the education system has been pulled back from the brink or is going to be allowed to stagnate for longer. Or perhaps you occupy a middle ground, believing to hit the pause button was the right decision, but also that reform is still needed.
The danger, of course, is that the further we move from the 2021 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) review of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), as well as the turmoil caused by the cancellation of the exams during the pandemic, the more we lose sight of the impetus for change that saw the government nailing its colours to the mast in October 2021, and saying the time was right to reform qualifications and assessment.
The OECD review said “misalignment between CfE’s aspirations and the qualifications system became a barrier to CfE’s implementation in secondary education”.
It recommended a move away from traditional exams and “memory-based assessment” towards assessment approaches that chime better with “21st-century curricula”, including oral and practical presentations, projects and extended essays, and more continuous teacher assessment.
Meanwhile, the way students were assessed in 2020 and 2021 - by their teachers and their schools - posed many challenges, not least the workload burden placed on the shoulders of teachers. But there were also positives.
In 2020 and 2021, pass rates rose and the attainment gap narrowed. One upshot was the Scottish government had to fund more places at university, because more students had the qualifications they needed to get in.
University retention rates would appear to suggest these students are coping so far.
Of course, students getting their results in 2023 - a year of lower pass rates and wider attainment gaps - will not be afforded the same opportunities, and that is hard to reconcile.
In 2021, there was also no nerve-racking wait for exam results, as schools shared students’ grades with them before the summer holidays in a process that meant - whether delighted or disgruntled - students knew their grades and how they had been arrived at.
That students should be afforded this kind of feedback only as a one-off in a time of crisis seems at odds with the way Scottish schools are encouraged to operate - the philosophy of “child-centred learning”.
And yet, despite all the shortcomings of exams, there are headteachers who will still tell you (to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s quote about democracy) that they are the worst form of assessment - except for all the others that have been tried.
Meanwhile, research has shown there is consensus that assessment in schools should change, but not over whether that means more or less exams.
Professor Louise Hayward advocated something of a halfway house. She said in her landmark review of qualifications and assessment, published in June, that exams are “one important way of gathering evidence” but that just now there are too many of them.
Ultimately, whatever direction the government takes, successful implementation will depend on meticulous planning - including thorough consultation with the profession - investment and trialling.
Scottish education does not need another example of bold aims foundering because of muddled execution.
Emma Seith is senior reporter at Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith
