The S4 attainment rate at the crucial level immediately below Higher has sunk by nearly 12 per cent since 2013 - fuelling fears that thousands of students are being presented for the wrong qualifications.
Analysis by the University of Dundee’s Jim Scott also shows more than 100,000 “missing” awards for lower-level courses in S4, amid concerns they are struggling to gain the same credibility as the qualifications they replaced.
The news has prompted calls for “urgent action” to ensure that students do not miss out on vital qualifications and have their career prospects damaged.
Dr Scott found that in 2013, the last year of Standard Grade, 91.3 per cent of S4 enrolments to Level 5 courses led to attainment. In 2017 - after the old Level 5 qualifications of Standard Grade Credit and Intermediate 2 were replaced by National 5 - the rate was only 79.5 per cent.
“However you care to put it … attainment has fallen significantly,” said Dr Scott, a former secondary headteacher. He feared that many students were “falling through gaps”, partly because the new system of qualifications had been difficult for teachers to fully understand.
He added that “if anything, the pass rate should have risen” after the “structural change” in which S4 pupils in many schools are only allowed to take six or seven subjects, rather than the eight which were more common under the old qualifications.
Dr Scott also found 106,380 fewer Level 3 and Level 4 courses (National 3 and 4) being completed in 2017 than in 2013 - including “a huge block of Level 3 awards that has vanished [down from 60,093 to 15,543]” - when those levels equated to Standard Grade Foundation and Access 3, and Standard Grade General and Intermediate 1.
Around half could be explained by students taking fewer subjects than in the past, he said, with another 8,000 accounted for by alternatives such as Skills for Work and National Progression Awards.
However, that would still leave nearly 50,000 fewer completed courses at Levels 3 and 4 in 2017 than in 2013. Dr Scott suspects that many students have been “pushed uphill” to qualifications they find too difficult. “There can be pressure upon schools from all sorts of people - headteachers, local authorities and national government - to attain more,” he said.
A Scottish government spokesman said: “It is inappropriate to draw an analysis between attainment levels now and those in 2013. They relate to two entirely different testing regimes, and direct comparisons between the new National qualifications and Standard Grade pass rates cannot be made.
“What the results do show is that since 2014 there have been small variations in pass rates year-on-year, which demonstrate the high standards, strength and integrity of our national qualifications.”
This is an edited version of an article in the 25 August edition of Tes Scotland. Subscribers can read the full story here. To subscribe, click here. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here. Tes Scotland magazine is available at all good newsagents.
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