The new term is either already under way or soon to start throughout Scotland, with all pupils due back in school full time from next week. Many will be looking forward to this return to something approaching normality and finally (for the most part) being able to put remote learning behind them.

Writing in Tes Scotland last month, one secondary teacher revelled in his experience of welcoming back students to the classroom, working to the rhythm of the school bell once again and having a hoarse voice at the end of the day. “I never want to see Microsoft Teams again,” he wrote.

Yet, there will also be feelings of trepidation that are far more pronounced than the usual back-to-work blues. School staff have worries about safety and whether it will be possible to keep the more transmissible coronavirus variants in check, especially now that social distancing has all but been abandoned. And then there is the workload that awaits staff and pupils which, for some secondary teachers, will entail marking hundreds of assessments in a short space of time.

It feels as if warnings about the unfairness of the approach being taken to grading pupils this year are increasing in volume, but are they being heard at all? Last week, first minister Nicola Sturgeon said students were wrong to be concerned they were going to have to “do something that replicates a full, formal exam” ; there was no requirement for that this year, she insisted.

SQA assessment: Exams or no exams?

But for those of us who watched the results debacle unfold last year, all this is worryingly familiar. Back then, loud and clear warnings were given that the replacement certification model would have an unfair impact on pupils in schools with traditionally lower attainment - in other words, those schools serving, by and large, more disadvantaged areas.

The government was warned that these pupils were going to be judged based on the previous attainment of their schools - as opposed to their own merits - and they were. Cue outrage and a colossal mess, promptly followed by a colossal climbdown.

This year, there is a refusal on the part of the Scottish government to acknowledge that external exams have simply been replaced with classroom-based exams. This week, Tes Scotland explores the reasons why schools are planning exam-like assessments (see pages 8-9) but, suffice to say, it is happening. In many schools, students are typically going to sit two sets of assessments in each subject when they return - often a prelim or mock exam, followed by the real thing.

Last year, a malign algorithm was blamed when things went wrong - as if it had mutated, become sentient and started taking independent decisions. But, as the University of Stirling academic Dr Marina Shapira told the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee in November, “statistical algorithms do what they are told to do”.

Now it is looking as if the equivalent outcry in 2021 will centre on the pressure pupils are being put under and the fact that - despite all the upheaval they have endured and the exams having been cancelled in a bid to avoid a repeat scenario - everything continues to rest on a set of assessments to be sat over a few weeks in the spring.

These are what teachers will be basing their provisional grades on and, if students are unhappy, there is going to be no easy solution. Last time, there was ultimately a reversion to teacher judgement but, this year, it will be the teacher judgements that are the problem because, although the government has indicated that teachers will be trusted to award grades based on what they know of their pupils, that is just not being borne out by the reality on the ground.

We can only hope there will not be an almighty mess akin to that in 2020. Given how much more time there was to plan an alternative certification model this time around, that would be utterly inexcusable.

@Emma_Seith

This article originally appeared in the 16 April 2021 issue under the headline “Another year, another colossal mess over students’ grades?”