The cost of axing unit assessments has risen to £5.5 million - with Scotland’s exam body warning the bill could grow still higher.

In May, Tes Scotland revealed that the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) was budgeting £4.5 million in order to remove the unit assessments from National 5 qualifications.

Now a further Freedom of Information request shows the bill has risen by £1 million - with the SQA warning “the current cost estimate may change” as it continues “to respond to requests for additional support from teachers and lecturers”. The cost of removing unit assessments at Higher and Advanced Higher has yet to be factored in.

Conservative shadow education secretary Liz Smith said that, in trying to reduce the excessive workload created by unit assessments, the government has created “more chaos.”

The bulk of the money - £3.8 million - has been spent on additional staff salaries, including teacher secondments.

Ms Smith said: “The SNP has made a spectacular mess of this, and it seems the costs of these failings are still spiralling.”

She added: “The Scottish government was warned about the implications of this, but chose to ignore that.”

Earlier this year, the education secretary John Swinney had been warned before deciding to remove unit assessments last September that the move would leave pupils who failed the N5 exam without a safety net.

Six months later he was forced into a temporary U-turn, announcing that schools would be allowed to use unit assessment for another year, but only in “exceptional circumstances”.

According to the EIS teaching union, the SQA had used the removal of unit assessments to “do a full revamp of the qualifications”. That would have been necessary at some point, but there was “an interim position available”, which would have put less pressure on school staff, said general secretary Larry Flanagan.

However, he added that the scrapping of the unit assessments was essential. Mr Flanagan said: “The removal of unit assessments was necessary to reduce the assessment burden and workload burden. It is for the Scottish government to scrutinise the SQA bill.”

Increasing workload

Meanwhile Mike Corbett - an English teacher and member of the NASUWT teaching union’s executive - said that he expected the workload in his own subject to decrease this year, but it was in the minority and there was “no doubt” that for some subjects such as computing and biology, the N5 revisions were “increasing rather than reducing workload”.

He concluded that “the money involved in getting us to this point has not been well spent.”

Mr Corbett said the NASUWT position had been that unit assessments should have been reduced, but not removed.

An SQA spokesman said the costs covered all the work it had been asked to do and that the change from £4.5 million to £5.5 million had come because of “a more detailed understanding of the activities, resources and people that are required to deliver the revision of the assessments in 2017-18”.

He added: “We are continuing to respond to requests for additional support from teachers and lecturers relating to the revised national courses and - as this process of dialogue continues - we anticipate that the current cost estimate may change.”

The SQA’s annual budget is around £53 million a year. This year, the body’s budget for implementing CfE and the new national qualifications was almost halved, from £12.6 million to £6.4 million.

A Scottish government spokesman said: “The changes were made in response to demands from the system to reduce workload. It is very important that the changes are properly implemented and reflect a detailed understanding of what is required to achieve this, and how best to support teachers.

He added: “It is entirely right that budgets are monitored and managed each year to take account of the levels of funding required, and we will continue to review SQA’s requirements to ensure that the organisation is able to deliver on this programme of work successfully and efficiently.”