Students were being “withdrawn from National 5 and Higher courses if they were unlikely to attain”. That’s what parents told researchers looking into the way Curriculum for Excellence is being implemented in Scottish secondaries.
The University of Stirling report, published in February 2023, added: “Caregivers suggested that, in some instances, the motivation for students being entered at lower levels was to improve the school’s attainment statistics.”
Teachers also reported young people taking Higher were “withdrawn if they were unlikely to pass”.
‘Wide variation in results’
Fast forward to exam results day on 6 August 2024 and education secretary Jenny Gilruth comments on the “wide degree of variation in results between our 32 local authorities”, and promises to “work with our councils to drive the improvements we all want to see”.
Some of those regional gaps in attainment do, on the surface, seem stark.
For example at Higher, while the overall A-C pass rate for 2024 was 74.9 per cent, the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) data showed that this varied from 65.8 per cent in Angus to 84.9 per cent in East Renfrewshire, a gap of 19.1 percentage points.
On the face of it, this is a jaw-dropping SQA statistic - and regional variation in results has been hitting the headlines in England, where Westminster education secretary Bridget Phillipson has vowed to reverse inequalities in education.
In Scotland, all the usual warnings about comparing local authorities that serve very different areas apply. After all, anyone with a passing knowledge of Scottish education could have guessed that small and relatively affluent East Renfrewshire would be topping the table.
Who is being entered in the first place?
But when looking at pass rates, there is another important factor to consider - and the research findings quoted at the start of this piece hint at it. As well as considering the different contexts councils are working in we also need to ask, who is being entered in the first place?
Dr Marina Shapira - one of the authors of that 2023 University of Stirling research, which was funded by the Nuffield Foundation - says “moving the point of selection for qualifications changes results very considerably”.
She and her colleagues found after the Nationals were introduced a decade ago - replacing Standard Grades and Intermediates - “the percentage of passes for National 5 [level] qualifications increased from just under 60 per cent to around 80 per cent from 2014 onwards”.
But, crucially, they also found that fewer students were entered, prompting the researchers to conclude that “this selectivity might be partially responsible for the improved attainment”.
Changed performance or changed selection?
In other words, if you are more selective about who you put forward for a qualification you will get better results.
That is why Dr Shapira argues the focus should not be on the proportion of students entered that pass - rather, it should be on the proportion of the entire cohort passing different levels of qualification.
“Why does it matter what percentage of those that entered passed if we don’t know the conditions for entry,” she asks.
Ramping up the pressure on councils to improve pass rates could, therefore, have the unintended consequence of schools becoming even more selective in terms of the candidates they put forward.
Ultimately, Dr Shapira says the factors most likely to impact attainment are deprivation, as well as how well schools are resourced and staffed.
So, by all means, the government can use the pass rates as an impetus for discussion, but it has to consider ways in which the system might be worked to local advantage in the pursuit of higher pass rates.
There has to be recognition that disparities in attainment can largely be explained by levels of deprivation - when it comes to improving pass rates there are precious few genuine quick fixes.
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