At the risk of overusing 2021’s most overused word, we stand at an unprecedented crossroads for Scottish education. Events of the previous year and a half have brought into sharp focus the fact that our current examination system is nowhere near robust enough to withstand major disruption.

For the second year in a row, the upcoming results day next week will be a far different beast to what we were accustomed to pre-Covid. Everybody, from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) right through to classroom teachers, is seemingly united in a desire to see a major shake-up. Even so, the announcement in June that the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) was to be replaced because, as the OECD outlined, there is a “misalignment between Curriculum for Excellence’s aspirations and the qualification system” was still a seismic shock.

The possibility of a complete rethink of the way in which we assess pupil attainment and, perhaps more importantly, their future potential will also raise questions about how we judge the quality of the education our children and young people receive. One thing many will hope for is that it will signal the death knell for the annual production of school league tables, the product of lazy journalism which, using an old analogy, assumes you can fatten a cow by repeatedly weighing it.

Every year, hardworking teachers in schools across the country read headlines in the press showing that their efforts in getting pupils to the end of their school years and into positive destinations in employment, college or university courses are worthless. Their pupils have left without gaining five Highers and that, it seems, is all that matters.

How did we get into such a situation? There are very few degrees in Scottish universities that require five Highers for entry. Unless aiming for qualifications in, perhaps, law or medicine, most courses will be looking for maximum grades of AAAA or AABB at the end of S5. So, if this is what the children of our papers’ readers need to achieve their goals, why are schools still being judged on the five Highers benchmark?

The schools at the top of the league tables are hostage to their annual publication and to the parental discussions that they provoke if, for instance, a drop of one percentage point means they fall from the top 20. The tables take no account of small differences in cohorts from year to year and contain no indication of long-term trends. In smaller schools, one or two pupils can have a huge effect on percentage measures. Teachers are then held responsible for slight differences in performance because of a year group that performs slightly below normal.

Rather than a measure of how good a school is, the tables can only really be used as a proxy for indicators of poverty - a role they fit rather well. In schools such as mine, there are myriad and complex reasons why we regularly languish near the bottom of the table. Secondary education is expected to compensate for any hardships that pupils have suffered and many do this very well. We work hard with pupils to determine the best individual path to college or university (if that is their wish) and, for our school at least, this often means recommending that they follow four Highers to achieve better grades and reduce stress.

Bottom of the table

However, even if all our pupils were to leave school with an AAAA on their SQA certificate, we would still be consigned to the bottom of the table - an indication of just how ludicrous the measure is. The long-called-for “parity of esteem” between Highers and other qualifications, such as foundation apprenticeships, is only evident by its complete absence from the league tables. To expect parents, employers, universities and others to regard them as important qualifications in their own right can never happen when judged against the current obsession with five Highers.

Our pupils - like those in many other schools both within and outside the top 50 “best” chart - spend their time achieving in lots of different ways. At a basic level, the resilience shown by some in just getting themselves into class in the morning, after a night spent, perhaps, listening to constant arguing or lying on an inadequate mattress in a cold, damp room, is remarkable but impossible to measure. Others have arrived after a morning caring for their ill parents, or for younger siblings, ensuring they get into their own schools on time. These are important skills for life and work that are also judged to have no worth within the current system.

Meanwhile, many others take advantage of wider opportunities throughout their school years. These include (but are not limited to): working on the school farm, mentoring primary pupils and buddying new first years; working towards Saltire Awards volunteering and Duke of Edinburgh’s Awards; and taking part in such life-changing experiences as the Youth Philanthropy Initiative.

Many succeed in practical qualifications such as woodworking or cake craft, many build furniture and engineer go-karts, discovering talents and passions that are then taken forward into vocational courses at college and subsequent careers.

Few of these successes make it on to any measure of school effectiveness except, perhaps, when shown in positive destination figures or in anecdotal evidence from local businesses regarding the excellent employees who come from our school.

Shelley McLaren, headteacher of Craigroyston Community High School in Edinburgh, passionately got to the point in a Tes Scotland online article after this year’s league tables were published back in May: “No matter how much we’ve done in all other parts of school life throughout the year, the focus to determine our worth and whether we are a ‘good’ school seems to rest singlehandedly on the one measure of how many young people achieve five Highers in one sitting.”

Judging schools in this way is so obviously unfair, it beggars belief that it still holds credence in media and some political circles. The online abuse our pupils suffer about going to a “shit” school following the tables publication is disgusting to witness - and staff, too, are demoralised by ill-conceived attempts at good-natured banter. The efforts they have made to ensure all pupils are set up for life and are moving on to a worthwhile future - whether this be in employment, voluntary work, further or higher education - is forgotten.

The arguments against judging schools on purely academic terms are not new. In the 1970s, the pioneering Scottish headteacher RF Mackenzie decried that “the memorisation of information [was] the core work of Scottish schools” and that the system perpetuated an elitist view of education.

In the 1990s, Peter Murphy, a former headteacher and acolyte of Mackenzie, wrote about how the exam system “inhibits enquiry, it inspires boredom, it impedes experiment and progress, it enslaves the curriculum, it ignores real values, it measures useless information, it ignores character”.

The wider political world now seems to be catching up on this sort of thinking, so what, if we are intent on changing things, should our future assessment system look like? After all, even Finland - long seen as a marker for teacher autonomy and forward thinking - relies on a high-stakes end-of-schooling exam to determine pupils’ future paths.

Given the stress piled on to teachers last session with the alternative certification model applied to a second school year of Covid disruption, there are very few who would suggest the answer lies solely with continuous assessment marked entirely by staff within schools. It is likely that, for many subjects, there will still be a need for some form of external assessment, but the model needs to be more flexible and less subjective than the one we currently operate under.

Digital options

Combining coursework with exams and some aspects of teamwork and presentation (subject specific or not) would be more in tune with the principles of Curriculum of Excellence, and would be more conducive to measuring how well pupils have developed their skills and knowledge in line with CfE’s four capacities.

There may be some subjects for which an external assessment is still the best way of judging progress - maths teachers, for instance, have been more vocal than most about the need to maintain the current exam system. However, improvements can still be made. Why should pupils be forced to sit down and perform on a particular day (after, for instance, suffering from a lack of sleep or missing out on breakfast) when digital options would allow for progressive tests to be sat at a time when they can decide that they are ready? Whatever comes next, teachers must be involved in thinking through all the nuances.

With changes in the way we assess the achievements of our pupils, we could finally do away with the league tables, which lead to division, disillusionment and unhealthy competition in what should be a collaborative education system. Positive destinations, value-added and wider achievement are among the many aspects that we can use to assess how successful pupils have been in their learning.

Most importantly, such measures, trends and effects should not be reduced to a system for ranking schools. They are long-term goals for improvement but, for now, unfortunately, they need much more time and space than current political imperatives would seem to provide.

John Rutter is headteacher at Inverness High School

This article originally appeared in the 6 August 2021 issue under the headline “Tweak exams to turn the tables”