Education secretary John Swinney has told the Scottish Parliament that all students who received downgraded results last week as a result of the moderation process will be reissued with new grades “based solely on teacher or lecturer judgement”.
The move is a response to the mounting pressure the Scottish government has come under over the fairness of the system that replaced the exams, which were cancelled this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) said that teacher and lecturer estimates would lie at the heart of the new process. However, when the results were published last Tuesday, it transpired that 26.2 per cent of estimates were changed, with 93.1 per cent adjusted down.
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Disadvantaged pupils were also far more likely to have their results downgraded from a pass to a fail as a result of moderation, with some pupils taking to the streets in protest.
Now, John Swinney has said that where moderation led to an increased grade, “learners will not lose that award” but “all downgraded awards will be withdrawn”.
Mr Swinney also said the government would “make provision for enough places in universities and colleges to ensure that no one is crowded out of a place” and announced there would be an independent review of the events following the cancellation of the exam diet, and the alternative model put in place by the Scottish Qualifications Authority. The review he said would be led by Professor Mark Priestley of Stirling University.
The provisional revised 2020 pass rates are therefore:
- 88.9 per cent for National 5, up 10.7 percentage points on 2019
- 89.2 per cent for Higher, up 14.4 percentage points on 2019
- 93.1 per cent for Advanced Higher, up 13.7 percentage points on 2019
Mr Swinney said: “I can confirm to Parliament today that all downgraded awards will be withdrawn.
“Using powers available to me in the Education (Scotland) Act 1996, I am today directing the SQA to re-issue those awards based solely on teacher or lecturer judgement.
“Schools will be able to confirm the estimates they provided for pupils to those that are returning to school this week and next.
“The SQA will issue fresh certificates to affected candidates as soon as possible and, importantly, will inform Ucas and other admission bodies of the new grades as soon as practical in the coming days to allow for applications to college and university to be progressed.”
Arguably it was always a nonsense to expect estimations of the outcome of a process that didn’t happen to be anything like the outcome had the process happened. Maybe the problem was more philosophical than statistical?
- Melvyn Roffe (@roffeme) August 11, 2020
Barry Black, the University of Glasgow postgraduate researcher who first drew attention to the disparity in downgrades between pupils living in areas with different levels of deprivation, said: “This whole process has been one of great uncertainty and could have been avoided from the start had the SQA and Scottish government listened to the warnings from as early as April.
“The changes announced today would not make for an ideal alternative method if they were planned from the start, but are fairer than the methodology that was used and will be of huge relief to the impacted young people.
“It is a welcome change. An urgent review is the right thing, including looking at the role of assessment more generally, especially since we know that there is an even bigger risk of a hugely widened attainment gap in the next school year.”
EIS union general secretary Larry Flanagan said his union had “warned that overturning these estimates by means of statistical modelling on the part of the SQA would lead to an outcry”.
He said: “We urged the SQA to hold professional dialogue with centres where apparent anomalies were evident, but it refused to do so - preferring to focus instead on its own perceived profile as custodians of standards. Its standing amongst teachers is undoubtedly tarnished by its role in these matters.”
“The SQA should be less accountable to the Scottish Government and more accountable to the teaching profession, parents and pupils. It needs to shed some of its hubris and listen more to teachers and their representatives.”
Mr Flanagan added: “Whilst the immediate issue may now be resolved, there is a much bigger question to be asked about how our current high-stakes assessment system regularly fails children through operating notional quotas for the awarding of As, Bs, and Cs which inevitably impact most on pupils on the cusp of achieving pass grades, the majority of whom are more likely to be from disadvantaged backgrounds. This needs to be addressed urgently through the announced review.
“The current planning for next year’s exam diet on the basis of business as usual, seems woefully complacent. Scotland’s young people and their teachers must not suffer the same fiasco again.”
