The Scottish Qualifications Authority results debacle prompted students to take to the streets to protest against their grades and opposition parties to call for education secretary John Swinney to be sacked.

Later today a vote of no confidence in Mr Swinney will be tabled because of his handling of the grading process that replaced the cancelled exams. The motion is expected to be defeated but many questions remain to be answered about what went wrong last week.

Yesterday, the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee - which repeatedly pressed the SQA to publish its moderation methodology ahead of results day, to no avail - got the chance to grill SQA chief executive Fiona Robertson and director of qualifications Gill Stewart.

They were asked why the SQA designed its moderation process “in secret” and failed to heed warnings, and if they supported Mr Swinney’s decision to base the results on teacher estimates, unless moderation had resulted in an upgrade.

Here is what they had to say on the key questions:

Would the SQA apologise?

Apparently not, because Fiona Robertson didn’t. Instead, responding to the Conservative MSP and education spokesman Jamie Greene, who invited the SQA to apologise, Ms Robertson said that, whilst she regretted the experience of some students, the SQA had received a commission from the Scottish government and had done its “very best to deliver”.

When schools were having as many as 76 per cent of Higher results downgraded, did that not set alarm bells ringing?

Labour MSP Daniel Johnson led this line of questioning. Ms Robertson said some Scottish schools had shown “anomalous results” but these were “relatively small in number” and the intention had been to address this in the final stage of the process, through appeals. This stage, though, was never reached due to the decision by Mr Swinney to accept teacher estimates, except where results had been adjusted upwards.

Ms Stewart added that the SQA did sample the impact of its methodology on individual schools and colleges but, because there were 22,000 course and centre combinations, it could not look at the impact on “every single centre, for every single course”, given the relatively short period of time it had.

Why did the SQA introduce a system in the ‘sure and certain knowledge’ that students in schools with poorer past performance would be ‘more heavily impacted’?

Labour MSP and education spokesman Iain Gray posed this question and Ms Robertson eventually - after hesitating - said: “I wouldn’t quite accept that characterisation.”

She then added that the SQA had sought to introduce a process that did not “bind” schools to past performance “entirely”.

It was right that the moderation process was based on the data, she said, and if the SQA had not used historic attainment data it would have been “very difficult to do any moderation at all”.

In relation to the figures that have caused so much controversy, and which show that after moderation the pass rate for the students living in the poorest communities was reduced by the greatest margin, Ms Robertson said there were big differences between this year’s teacher estimates and historical attainment and “increasingly so across the deciles of deprivation”, but that was “a function of the estimates”.

The outcome of this year’s results was a narrowing of the attainment gap, albeit “a modest one”, she said.

Why did the SQA develop its methodology in secret and ignore warnings that using school prior attainment data would impact on students in the most disadvantaged communities?

SNP MSP Alex Neil said “everyone and their granny” knew that a moderation process that focused on schools’ prior attainment would hit students from disadvantaged areas hardest. He said it was “built into the methodology from day one” and was “entirely predictable”, but SQA had failed to heed warnings, not least from the education committee itself.

Responding, Ms Robertson said she thought it was important the SQA was “a listening organisation”. She added: “There are two parts to the story. Does the system and the committee accept moderation should have been done at all? That’s the first question. The second question is what’s the best method of doing that?

“I certainly made clear way back at the beginning of this process that we needed to reserve the right to moderate actually to ensure fairness for learners, given the potential issues with estimation that I highlighted to you earlier.”

In her opening statement, Ms Robertson set out that an analysis of Scottish teacher estimates based on 2019 results had shown that teachers accurately predicted students’ results less than half the time.

In 2019, 48 per cent of teacher estimates were “resulted at that level” for N5, she said. At Higher, that figure was 44 per cent, and at Advanced Higher 43 per cent.

Has the SQA learned from its mistakes this year?

This one also came from Mr Neil. Ms Robertson said there was now a formal independent review underway being conducted by the University of Stirling’s Professor Mark Priestley, which was due to report initial findings within five weeks. She said that the SQA would cooperate “fully and positively with that process”, adding that “if there are lessons to be learned, we will learn them”.

Does the SQA think standards have been maintained and is it comfortable with Mr Swinney’s decision to go with teacher estimates?

Ms Robertson had to be pushed on this by the MSP posing the question - a Conservative shadow education minister, Jamie Halcro Johnston - because initially she kept repeating what first minister Nicola Sturgeon and Mr Swinney had to say on the matter - basically that the decision reflects “the extraordinary nature of the year”. However, eventually she said: “I don’t think we will be able to compare this year’s results to future results in the same way because the basis upon which the results have been made is different.”

When was the Scottish government told the details of this year’s results?

Mr Swinney received a briefing on the results five days before results day, on Thursday 30 July. It was a thorough briefing but he did not get all the documentation at that time, said Ms Robertson.