Scottish pupils are the most over-examined in the world, according to an expert who recently analysed assessment in the country.

Professor Gordon Stobart went on to argue that one solution could be to end exams at National 5 - a qualification he described as “not fit for purpose”.

He made the comments yesterday, following the publication on 31 August of his report for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Upper-Secondary Education Student Assessment: a comparative perspective, which was commissioned by the Scottish government.

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“I think Scottish students are the most over-examined in the world,” said Professor Stobart during an online event organised by the University of Glasgow’s school of education, called Time for Change?

While he stressed that “I may be corrected” on his belief that no other country examines its school-level students to the same degree, Professor Stobart noted how unusual the Scottish pathway was, with its end-of-year, end-of-course exams in S4 (typically National 5s), S5 (Highers) and S6 (Advanced Highers).

“I don’t know any other system that has three separate levels of examinations in three years,” he said.

Professor Stobart - an emeritus professor of education at the Institute of Education, University College London, and an honorary research fellow at the University of Oxford - had, in his August OECD report, previously floated the idea of moving away from National 5 exams.

Yesterday, he posed the question, “How do you make the examinations less dominant of the entire senior [secondary] phase?”

He said that “my way forward” would be to ask, “do we need the National 5 - could we not be offering a school-based certificate at 16 which actually looks at the wider curriculum?”

This, in the early part of the senior phase, would leave space in secondary schools “for a lot more going on, in what [students] come out with at the end of S4”.

While acknowledging that Highers and Advanced Highers could be justified in their current form as means of aiding selection for university and employment, Professor Stobart said: “I can’t see the fitness for purpose of National 5.”

He added that “you could be doing something more useful with certification at that point” and that the current set-up in Scotland’s senior phase did not fit well with the ambitions of Curriculum for Excellence.

Professor Stobart also said that “Scotland has a good vocational offer” but that vocational qualifications are “not particularly integrated” with exams - despite both being overseen by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA).

“It strikes me that they’re separate strands and they’re kept separate,” he said, noting the irony that vocational qualifications often seemed a better fit with Curriculum for Excellence.

Professor Stobart was also keen to explore how the current assessment and exam arrangements affected the typical day of a teacher in Scotland.

He said that OECD analysis had found that “Scottish teachers spend more time teaching in classrooms” and that “often in other cultures, it’s less than that” - although “I don’t know whether that means the teachers [in other countries] do other, broader things [in their curricula]”.

Professor Stobart also underlined the importance of involving pupils in any exams reform, because “the people most affected by assessments and examinations are students - they’re the ones who take them, they’re the ones who are shaped by them, the ones who form their identity around what happens in assessment systems”.

Still time for young people to have their say on education reform. https://t.co/pRB4pP2fH7

- School Leaders Scotland (@LeadersScotland) November 17, 2021

The University of Glasgow event was chaired by Professor Louise Hayward, who, it was announced in October, will be leading a group advising the Scottish government on “how agreed principles may be translated into a design for delivering assessment and qualifications”.

She highlighted that in Scotland, “in some ways, compared to England, the accountability system [in education] is really benign.”

Even so, there were still unintended consequences, such as unofficial school league tables based on results in exams and, in primary school, other national assessments.

“So even when the accountability isn’t being driven by government, the accountability framework within the society still has a negative impact, I think, on behaviours in schools,” she said.