Donna Stewart, Scotland’s newly appointed chief examiner, wants to “bridge the gap” between schools and teachers and the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA)
“I have a really deep understanding of how our assessments play out in reality, in classrooms,” says Stewart. “I’ve experienced it and I think that’s the key strength in terms of me picking up this role.”
She adds: “Being able to bridge that is really, really important, and that’s where I want to focus my energies.”
Stewart became chief examiner in February, taking over from Fiona Robertson, whose departure triggered the separation into two jobs of the SQA chief executive and chief examiner roles.
‘Focused leadership’ on qualifications reform
The point of the split, says Stewart, is that there can be “focused leadership” around qualifications reform - which she will take forward.
The transition to Qualifications Scotland this year, meanwhile, will be driven by the new chief executive, a post being filled on an interim basis by John Booth, previously the SQA’s director of communications.
Stewart joined the SQA in 2023 after a short spell at the General Teaching Council for Scotland as an education engagement officer.
Previously, Stewart - who began her career as a physics teacher - worked as a depute headteacher in both West Lothian and Fife, a quality improvement officer, a faculty head and a principal teacher.
In all, she has spent 25 years working in schools and emphasises this “depth of experience” as a “key strength”.
Undoubtedly, she will need to harness all that inside knowledge in order to bridge the gap between schools and the SQA - a gap that has arguably expanded to a gulf in recent times.
The relationship was strained to breaking point during the pandemic, when the annual SQA exams were cancelled and teachers were responsible for grading students.
The low point came in 2020, when the moderation process put in place by the SQA resulted in grades being adjusted in line with a school’s past performance; the upshot was students protesting over final grades that bore no relation to their performance over the course of the year.
Ultimately, the changes were thrown out and the grades initially awarded by schools were reinstated.
Myriad problems facing SQA
More recently, there has been the fallout over the drop in the Higher history pass rate, which fell by just over 13 percentage points between 2023 and 2024.
This prompted accusations that changes to the marking standard had precipitated the drop, not a poorer cohort, as the SQA has argued. And the saga - which saw Stewart, Booth and SQA chair Shirley Rogers called before the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee in February - has exposed myriad problems.
SQA markers have reported being afraid to raise issues in case they lose their jobs; longstanding dissatisfaction with the way history is assessed has also come to the fore.
On the Higher history issue, Stewart says: “I’m actually determined to get us to a point where we are working well with our stakeholders and actually we are listening and changing what we do.
“We’ve got our ’prospectus for change’ and one of the key things in there is about having our qualifications being credible - and they’re only credible if our stakeholders and our learners and our teachers think they are credible.”
Stewart says work on qualifications reform will get fully underway when Qualifications Scotland comes into being in the autumn - that is the “marker in the sand”, when SQA will start to demonstrate “really strong engagement” with “teachers, learners and other stakeholders”.
The SQA will be scrutinising each subject as it seeks to find the most appropriate “balance in the way of assessing”, says Stewart. Timelines will be settled upon through work with Education Scotland as it carries out the ”curriculum improvement cycle”.
“It’s really important that qualifications and curriculum work together,” she says, while stressing that nothing will be done “without stakeholder engagement”.
Looking at each subject individually
She adds: “This is about looking at each subject individually, what the requirement is and what the ask is from teachers, from learners and from a range of stakeholders and looking to make sure it’s the right type of assessment that is in place for each individual qualification.”
In terms of the “rationalisation” of qualifications in the senior phase - promised by education secretary Jenny Gilruth in response to the Hayward review of qualifications and assessment - Stewart says there are some qualifications that have little or no uptake and that this is the starting point.
Ultimately, the goal is to have “a really robust portfolio of qualifications that are easy to navigate, that are streamlined and are completely fit for purpose”.
“There is a recognition that things need to change,” says Stewart. “There is an openness to that; we are working our backsides off to make things different. I’m quite genuine when I say it’s a privilege to be in this situation. You only get this chance once to be involved in something that is going to change dramatically.”
She adds that this is “the only way we are going to rebuild trust - through engagement and demonstrating that we are actually changing our qualifications”.
Early proof that the SQA is indeed listening will come, says Stewart, when more detail on the removal of a final exam from some practical subjects is made public - something that is expected imminently. The obvious riposte is that it would have been better to have listened to teachers back in 2017, when the SQA was warned against introducing such exams in the first place.
However, with new leadership comes fresh promise of a national qualifications body that will listen to teachers and act upon their concerns. The early mood music from Donna Stewart will seem encouraging to the profession - but the true test starts in the autumn, after the SQA morphs into Qualifications Scotland.
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