Following education secretary John Swinney’s announcement yesterday, Twitter and the press were full of celebrations at this “victory for fairness”. For the individual students who will be able to achieve their dreams and go to university as a result, I am delighted. Nobody gets into teaching wanting to see young people suffer, and knowing that the students under our care will achieve their dreams is one of the best feelings a teacher can have.

But that warm glow is tempered by a wider concern that this new position isn’t fairer - it just appears that way. In making this decision, the Scottish government hasn’t left us in a fairer landscape, it has just moved the goalposts for fairness and, in one fell swoop, shifted the blame from the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) to individual schools and teachers.

One of the truest reactions to the results this year, and one that hasn’t been hugely well reported, is that the initial system wasn’t dramatically different to what happens every year. Grade boundary meetings looking at bell curve distributions are a part of the process each and every year. Every time a headline praises a rise in pass rates at Higher, or laments them falling, I - as a teacher, leader of a department and SQA appointee - have to laugh, because these rates are carefully determined through norm referencing and so have no objective value in determining anything. We have always been in thrall to the bell curve, but most seemed not to realise.

It wasn’t that this year’s process was less fair - it was simply that people saw how the sausage was made.

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So, is the new system, where everyone downgraded gets their estimated mark, fairer? No. I’ve seen the opinion expressed that if our estimates are inaccurate, it’s better for them to be overly generous. And, by and large, I agree with that sentiment. But there’s a problem there: consistency.

The general outrage about teachers’ judgements being questioned is predicated upon the false assumption that all teacher judgments are equal: they are not.

SQA results 2020: This crisis has exposed existing problems in the system

Every year, as an SQA appointee, I see markers struggle to find the national standard. They mostly get there, and the SQA has excellent quality assurance processes to sample marking and maintain standards ensuring that individual students are treated fairly. But every team leader knows they often need to intervene to support their markers, to help them zero in on what that standard is, and maintain it. Every year, the exceptional circumstances processes reveal centres that were wildly lenient in their marking of prelims and internal assessments.

Given all that, it seems absurd to suggest that every teacher in Scotland knows exactly what an A, B, C looks like. (Not to mention, of course, that there is no objective standard for those grades - still enjoying that sausage?)

And that’s assuming that all teachers made their estimates this year according to the same principles. I know how long my department agonised over the process. I know we looked at our historic data. And I know we took hard decisions when deciding where to draw the line on grade boundaries. So I know our grades weren’t inflated…but the overall grades were. Dramatically so. So some schools must have been too generous.

What this means is that we - and many other schools around the country whose teachers had the expertise to get the level right, took care to evaluate their data, and had the courage to make hard decisions - have in effect penalised our students. Our professionalism and expertise led to them getting a lower grade. Had we been more “aspirational” in our estimates, our students would now have better grades. And that’s not to mention bias (a number of reports suggest the estimates for black and ethnic minority students will likely have been affected by unconscious bias).

That is every bit as unequal and unfair as what we had before.

But, it won’t lead to headline-grabbing protests against the SQA in the centre of Glasgow. It’s harder to see, statistically, and the outrage won’t be directed at the central authorities of the SQA or the Scottish government - it’ll be focused on individual schools. On individual teachers.

I fervently hope that this mess will lead to a serious overhaul of the exam system - Melvyn Roffe’s article on this lifted my hopes somewhat. We can and should be doing better by our young people.

But this “fix” hasn’t made things fairer, it’s just hidden the unfairness and shifted the focus of the ire. I feel disheartened and betrayed, and I am dreading the next few weeks. 

The writer is a secondary teacher in Scotland