Tuesday will, for the second year in a row, mark a very different results day to what everyone knew pre-Covid. After the debacle of 2020, the “alternative certification model” (ACM) promised to be the means by which, despite the Covid pandemic, qualifications would run far more smoothly in 2020-21.

After it was finally confirmed last December that all 2021 national exams had been cancelled, education secretary John Swinney promised a back-up plan founded on “teacher judgement of evidence of learner attainment”.

A lot has happened since: from the widespread sharing of details of exams (amid ongoing protestations that these weren’t not exams) on social media, to the departure of Swinney from his education brief after a turbulent year, to the announcement in June that the days of the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) were numbered.

The final chapters of the 2021 SQA results story will play out over the coming weeks, but what has the year to this point been like for teachers? Tes Scotland news editor Henry Hepburn canvassed the views of five classroom teachers and two senior leaders on an anonymous basis, allowing them to be as frank as possible about their experience of the ACM.

Senior leaders

‘Misinformation was followed by misinformation’

This year’s ACM, for me, prompts anger and contempt. Thinking back to the uncertainty of August last year, it was obvious we would have a year of disruption and the possibility of a second cancellation of exams (even more so over the following months, with increasing numbers of pupils sent home - either symptomatic or to self-isolate - and others kept off by worried parents).

The ACM removed the burden of exams from the SQA and placed it squarely on the shoulders of school staff. Misinformation was followed by misinformation. First, we weren’t having exams, then we were but they would be run entirely in the schools and called “assessments”. These would be under normal exam conditions (except when they weren’t) and would reflect the whole of a course that pupils had been unable to complete. We were given exams (sorry, assessments) that we could complete with pupils, except we could do it over several different days, but it wouldn’t be rigorous unless we changed the grade boundaries. And then these assessments were released on the internet and it was our fault because our security wasn’t good enough.

Yet teachers worked tirelessly to ensure that their pupils gained the right grades - even without the added-value units and course assessments which, especially for pupils in deprived areas, enable them to show the quality of work they are capable of.

I tried to advise staff that they were on track, while rumours of how other schools were doing things differently caused confusion. It was obvious that, no matter how hard we tried, there was little consistency in the ACM between schools. The main victims in all this were our pupils: stressed, disorientated, over-tested and under-supported by a system they had no part in making, in which their voices were not heard.

After an announcement on 21 June, the replacement of the SQA appears one step closer. Afterwards, we can at last work towards a truly collaborative assessment system that reflects the ambitions of Curriculum for Excellence and the potential of our wonderful young people.

‘I feel torn and exposed by the whole process’

It is August 2019, and there’s a crowd of teachers skipping holiday to be in on results day. They matter on a personal level: they are the culmination of my work, too, and part of my identity as a teacher. On a very deep level, I want them to be fantastic, for me and my students.

But on 10 August 2021, there will be a whole different feeling. There are no surprises: we already know the results. And instead of being on the students’ side, up against the exams edifice, it was me who awarded the grade. I cannot be the only teacher who feels torn and exposed by the whole process.

Torn because the first job of a teacher is to build relationships, to be on the side of their students. This year, it felt that teachers were caught in a dangerous middle zone: we were not sure how our grading would be checked, parents might be unhappy and politicians might blame grade inflation on teachers.

We felt exposed because, this year, the SQA delegated many of its normal roles to schools: it no longer set the exams, marked them, moderated the marking or applied its usual data analysis to the awarding of grades. Instead, separate “SQAs” in each school did all this.

This change in role unnerved some of us. It felt as if the pandemic was forcing us to square a circle by using both our “holistic” judgement while basing results on “demonstrated attainment”. There was also a huge range of helpful advice but some of it was conflicting in different subject areas.

Despite that, my experience at a practitioner level this year has been very positive. The chatrooms in my professional association have been full of discussions about setting papers, and there were hundreds of conversations to help us feel our way. I feel that our school took a clear line with crucial decisions to support staff. Most importantly, our students have got their well-deserved grades, based on a huge amount of professional thought, despite the pandemic.

This year, our emotions will not come all at once, on the same day in August, but the relief that we’ve made it will be just as real.

Classroom teachers

‘A mess and something I never want to endure again’

Ask a teacher what the toughest part of 2020-21 was and you might get a few different responses - you might regret asking the question, having just teed up an explosive rant born out of sheer exhaustion or end-of-their-tether frustration.

Possibly, they’ll mention the considerable challenges of adapting to an entirely new environment for teaching, given the lengthy stints of online learning. Maybe the answer will cite the sore throats and sweaty faces resulting from a full day of teaching through a mask. I’d expect a few to mention the impracticalities of moving on with a topic when 20 pupils are off self-isolating. The accumulation of all of these - and more - meant even the most enthusiastic and positive teachers were left feeling scunnered.

As if 2020-21 wasn’t brutal enough, it ended with schools being fobbed off with an “alternative certification model”. The official line was that there were “no exams”. In reality, we did have exams but administered in a much less efficient way by already swamped teachers.

Let me give a glimpse of what I witnessed as a class teacher, which doesn’t really touch on the experience for the poor students and barely captures the horrible time the school SQA coordinator faced.

Although assessments could be created and modified within schools, others were provided by the SQA; these were used widely, which seemed like a workload win. However, they didn’t come with marking schemes (losing consistency in terms of what marks were being awarded for across the country), weren’t kept secure (they cropped up on social media and led to one candidate in our school regurgitating a perfect solution that they couldn’t even match to the correct question) and were issued on different days (meaning candidates and tutors could give hints to students).

Students faced assessment overload in being given multiple opportunities, across umpteen subjects, to get their best possible score. They were under more pressure than ever, while teachers waded through marking as workload piled up. The inconsistency in cut-off scores from school to school and authority to authority was alarming. Then, speculative but time-consuming appeal requests began to flood in. The £400 bonus that teachers were offered was a bargain for the government given the hours devoted to this ACM.

This year was a mess and something I never want to endure again. It confirmed for me that the calls to redesign our qualifications system and scrap exams need a serious rethink. Credibility of the grades awarded is paramount and externally assessed exams provide a fair way for candidates’ performances to be compared.

After these well-earned holidays, I hope we can look forward to a new school year with things returning to normality - including the return of a workable certification model.

‘I was constantly questioning my judgements’

I remember feeling relieved when the exams were first cancelled. Our students had clocked out in the first lockdown, and now we had a way to get them back on track. A blessing, right?

Not so much. Some subjects got information sooner than others. Some had strict guidance on evidence gathering, others less so. English lost speaking components but languages didn’t. N4s had their AVUs (added value units) cancelled but not until early 2021, by which point many had already completed them.

We had to gather evidence that “replicates, as far as possible, the SQA question paper…under supervision and control” and shorter assessments would “provide less breadth, depth and challenge” so it was recommended not to do this (which read to us as “sit a full, timed exam, please and thank you”). How much evidence did we need? One total piece? One for each component? Two for each component or two pieces total? You could split the exam but, if you did, you had to change grade boundaries. But then, no, you didn’t. Then, yes, you did (in certain circumstances). We had to consider historic attainment when setting estimates but were also told that we should be giving the students the mark they deserved for the work they did - so to disregard historic attainment.

It was all so confusing.

January’s lockdown meant that those of us who had planned prelims now couldn’t run them. Assessments couldn’t be done in lockdown because they left too much room for cheating, according to SQA guidelines. So many of us had to force in a prelim and a final exam between April and June to get enough evidence, and we couldn’t take students off timetable for exams, resulting in students bouncing from exam to exam in class time almost nonstop for two months. Our “bonus” inset for moderation was on 7 June, when the SQA had already uplifted the work for their checks in May. Then there was the debacle of the SQA paper - which, inevitably, ended up being shared on social media by students (honestly, can we blame them?).

I have been an SQA marker for some years yet was constantly questioning my judgements. The hours of work put in by staff this year to get this right for our students have well exceeded the measly £400 (before tax) we might eventually see in our October pay packets. How on earth have our probationers, NQTs and single-staff departments coped? Considering the numbers signed off on stress this year, I fear the answer is that they simply didn’t.

‘We danced through the circus of exams that were not-exams’

I teach English, and certainly felt there was room for improvement in 2020-21 in how we gather qualifications evidence in my subject. Through increasing the focus on ongoing coursework, capturing genuine response to literature and ending the madness of the closed-book critical essay, Covid provided the chance to establish a fairer, more holistic range of assessment.

Obviously, the SQA did none of this. Instead, we danced through the circus of exams that were not-exams, subjecting pupils to every ounce of exam-related stress they’d have normally experienced.

At my school - in the independent sector - we placed pupils’ wellbeing and happiness at the forefront of our thinking. Very early, we established a timetable of assessments and ran these more or less as we had in previous years, with senior pupils given study leave, access to online revision resources and supportive, targeted conversations. There were two rounds of assessment, which allowed pupils to improve upon their first result if they felt they were able to. But this was left for them to decide, in agreement with their parents or guardians. We did not want pupils to feel they were being over-stretched or that they were having to prioritise any subject over another.

I believe the system worked as well as it could, with most pupils receiving the grades their performance over the year merited. Grading pupils turned out to be time-consuming yet manageable. I have been marking for the SQA for around 10 years and, presumably, this experience made the process cleaner for me. I can imagine other teachers without that background might have struggled here.

In any case, and in any school year, marking English papers is never straightforward. How, for example, can anyone satisfactorily decide what score a short story should get? It is too subjective for there to be a nailed-on answer, too open to interpretation, too dependent on the marker’s own world view and analytical skills.

In summary, the ACM has worked for me as well as I might have hoped. It is not perfect - but neither is the traditional SQA assessment for English. We must hope for reform, improvement and innovation in whatever comes next.

‘It feels like the bell is about to ring in a boxing match’

It feels like the bell is about to ring to signal the end of the second round in a boxing match between teachers and the SQA - but is anyone left standing?

It was a five-stage alternative certification model for 2020-21 - that’s what the SQA said they would put in place, anyway. A comprehensive, timely and well-articulated model that would ensure teachers, pupils, and parents would clearly understand the entire process of certification (aye, I’ll tell the jokes).

The first stage (November 2020 until April 2021) lasted six months and was essentially the majority of the school year: around 180 days when “learning, teaching and assessment, together with the consolidation of learning” was “ongoing”.

Stage 2 (April to May 2021) and stage 3 (end of May to 25 June 2021): the point where it really did become a shambles. We were quite simply let down, left scratching our heads at a system sold to us as being empowering for teachers and in the interests of individual pupils, but which wasn’t. By the time we reached stage 4 (after the 25 June deadline for submission of provisional results to the SQA), what little faith I had in the SQA was so far gone.

As a teacher, you do everything you can for your pupils but, during this past year, we have been forced to align ourselves with an ACM that did not have their best interests at heart. For some, final grades were decided through the sitting of exams that supposedly weren’t exams; for others, it was simply a matter of preparing answers to exam questions that had been plastered over social media platforms such as TikTok.

As the final bell in this boxing match gets set to ring (stage 5: the appeals process), I am optimistically pinning some hope on pupils being able to challenge any unfairness they have fallen victim to in the ACM. And, when this all becomes a distant memory, I hope we don’t simply return to normal, I hope we are on the road to something better.

‘It wasn’t the alternative certification model that caused my stress this year’

Entering this academic year, I had an element of fear - as a principal teacher of expressive arts, I was awaiting guidelines on what we could and couldn’t do in the midst of Covid-19. We waited, waited and waited.

When advice came out about this year’s ACM, however, a sense of relief was felt among some staff. It honestly felt like a move in the right direction for Scottish education, in emulating how further and higher education works - I love the way I have seen continuous assessment used and valued by FE staff and students - and to focus on the continual learning of our students, not just a judgement on how they perform on a single exam sat on one day.

The focus on teacher judgement, verification, moderation, course content - all made for a year like no other. Teachers at all levels worked together to do the best they could. I really cherished those moments with my staff, finding out the story behind each student and the journey staff had gone on to reach the results presented. It felt we were taking ownership in what Curriculum for Excellence truly aims to be: ensuring the best possible progression in literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing for every child and young person, while closing the attainment gap.

Although this academic year was stressful in many ways, the ACM, for me, wasn’t an aspect of that. I hope, as we consider what our exams system will look like in the future, we move away from an archaic process of assessment and focus on personalised learning - enabling a new confidence in teacher judgement and innovation in our classrooms. We were given ownership this year to really shape our process and it would be sad to remove that now.

Henry Hepburn is news editor for Tes Scotland. He tweets @Henry_Hepburn

This article originally appeared in the 6 August 2021 issue under the headline “What teachers really think of the ACM”