This week, MSPs on the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee got the opportunity to grill representatives from the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA), Education Scotland and education directors’ body ADES.

We take a look at what the panel had to say about how students will be assessed this year, following the cancellation of the exams in December.  

1. Appeals

The consultation process for 2021 appeals will “go live in the next week or so”, said SQA chief executive Fiona Robertson, with the final model unveiled in late April or early May “at the latest”. Ms Robertson was asked why the consultation had not been launched sooner; she said that was as a result of work taking place on modifying courses, and also the exam-replacement model.

The big issue with appeals last year, raised by children’s rights campaigners, was that pupils had no direct right of appeal so if they disagreed with the teacher judgement, they could appeal only with the backing of their school.

Education secretary John Swinney and the SQA have now said that last year’s appeal process is closed.

However, Scotland’s children’s commissioner remains clear that: “The 2020 certification and qualification accreditation system operating in Scotland has failed to provide adequate human rights protections by the State, as it does not permit individuals access to justice through appeals or reviews, or to any form of redress or remedy.”

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2. Security of question papers

The SQA has made available exam papers for schools to use in full or in part when gathering evidence of pupil attainment. But because these papers will not be taken at the same time - as a result of the cancellation of the exams - school are warned to “remind candidates that they must not discuss the content of the paper with anyone, including friends, family or on social media”. One academic, Professor Lindsay Paterson, has previously said that anyone who believes this is going to happen has “lost touch with reality”.

When Fiona Robertson was asked about this, she said the papers were on a secure website, that schools had “flexibility” around the way pupils were assessed, and that she did not expect the same assessments to be sat in different schools.

She said: “I would not anticipate that across Scotland every young person would be taking exactly the same test paper or exam paper…There will be a variety of approaches reflecting the circumstances and the curricular approach that is taken by individual schools.”

Steven Quinn, chair of the ADES Curriculum, Assessment and Qualifications Network, added that while some schools in some subjects might use papers in their entirety, teachers would need to design assessments that reflected the course content their pupils had covered “while maintaining national standards”.

3. SQA timeline for assessment

The date by which schools have to submit their estimates has now been pushed back to 25 June but Ross Greer, who leads on education for the Scottish Greens, sought clarity on whether pupils would effectively finish their courses at the end of May, given that by the end of that month the SQA timeline indicates its intention to “provide feedback on assessment evidence”.

However, Fiona Robertson said the quality-assurance process was “an iterative process” and that the final evidence “does not need to be provided during May”.

She said: “We will be sampling a range of evidence to look to see whether that evidence has been assessed to standard but not all the learning and teaching needs to be done before that happens.”

Assessment will take place “into June”, added Mr Quinn. “All that will happen in May is SQA will ask for some sampling of initial assessment pieces so that they have a confidence that the process is working in schools. But children and young people will continue to learn and have their assessment for as long as is possible towards the end of June when we get those provisional grades in. That gives us the additional learning time and therefore the better opportunity for young people to achieve.”

4. Pressure from parents

This question, during the committee session on Wednesday, got off to a bit of an odd start with the SNP MSP Kenneth Gibson saying that primary schools required security at parents’ evenings because “parents with high expectations put huge pressure on teachers”. That was a picture the panel did not seem to recognise, but it acknowledged that Mr Gibson had raised an important point about parental pressure on teachers to increase grades.

Mr Quinn said it would not be one teacher determining the provisional grade: more than one teacher in a department would mark assessments and there would be a checking process within schools that would ensure “a consistency of marking across the piece”. There would also be sampling at local authority level, he said, and at a national level by the SQA.

Mr Quinn said: “If they do that when it comes to, as you suggest, a parent perhaps not being happy with the outcome the teacher has the level of protection and it is not them that has determined that provisional grade. That provisional grade has been determined by the process, which many people have been involved in, and that is critical to all of us because we cannot place the burden of responsibility only on the class teacher. That is unfair.”

5. Grade inflation

The panel was asked, given that there was grade inflation last year and that was likely to happen again this year, how would future cohorts not be disadvantaged?

Fiona Robertson emphasised that this was why “the standards are so important” and it’s not just about an A-grade being the same across the country this year, but “across years as well”.

She said it was a different assessment approach this year; events and materials were being produced to help teachers and understand the standards to grade consistently. There were also “checks and balances” in place, including cross-marking and sampling, she said.

“We are doing as much as we can around the integrity of the awards this year,” said Ms Robertson.