Students in schools and local authority areas that experience significant disruption due to the coronavirus pandemic will still have to sit exams if it is decided at a national level that they should go ahead, Scotland’s chief examiner has said.
Fiona Robertson, chief executive of the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA), said today that if nationally the decision is taken to run exams in 2022, there will be no flexibility to cancel them in a school or authority hit hard by Covid.
She said that if there is severe disruption in particular parts of the country, the SQA’s “exceptional circumstances service” could be used to highlight the challenges faced by individual students or cohorts of young people.
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The SQA’s exceptional circumstances service allows a school or college to submit alternative evidence if it believes a candidate has been disadvantaged in an exam as a result of, for example, illness or bereavement.
Ms Robertson made her comments this morning as she gave evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee on how pupils were assessed in 2021 (see the Twitter thread below).
The plan for SQA exams in 2022
It is the first time Ms Robertson has appeared before the committee since the Scottish government announced its intention to replace the SQA, and she took the politicians to task for “political comment which has at times been unacceptable” and for referring to the SQA being “abolished” or “scrapped”.
She said there was a lot of “skill and expertise” in the SQA that “Scotland will need in the future”.
The @ScotParl education committee is starting to take evidence on the way pupils were assessed this year from @sqanews including Fiona Robertson
- Emma Seith (@Emma_Seith) September 29, 2021
However, Ms Robertson more often found herself under attack and was grilled by MSPs on the role that historical attainment data played in grading this year, as well as how the SQA had ensured consistency of marking across the country and if the changes to the way students were assessed in 2021 were responsible for the attainment gap widening.
Ms Robertson said historical attainment data had no role in the SQA’s own quality assurance processes. Dr Gill Stewart, the body’s director of qualifications development, said that the sampling of evidence that teachers had based grades on had found that most schools and colleges had applied national standards.
When it came to the poverty-related attainment gap, Ms Robertson said while assessment had been different, so had learning and teaching, and disadvantaged students had suffered most from the disruption.
Ms Robertson defended the SQA’s handling of assessment in 2020 and 2021. She said that for 130 years exams had gone ahead and when they were cancelled, “there was no script” and there was “not a model sitting on a shelf waiting to be activated”.
Ms Robertson said that the 137,000 learners who received results in August could be proud of their achievements and have “full confidence” in their grades.
She said Scotland was the only country in the UK “to be clear” on assessment in 2022.
The government confirmed in August that exams would go ahead if it was safe to do so but that contingencies would be put in place - including further adjustments to courses and assessment or, in the worst-case scenario, cancelling the exams altogether.
Beth Black, the SQA’s director of policy, analysis and standards, said there would be no “dual assessment” this year.
She said that in the event of the exams being cancelled, the evidence teachers gather in the course of a normal year would provide the basis for grading, and that teachers should not worry about “undertaking additional assessment to keep in their back pocket”.
Ms Robertson admitted that very few students have had experience of sitting national exams and MSPs expressed concern that they would be coming to the situation “cold”.
However, Ms Robertson said that modifications to assessments and courses had been made “up front” and that these were “not trivial” and they “are helping, and will help, learners”.
She also said that schools and colleges were experienced in preparing students for exams, but she refused to be drawn on whether she expected the pass rate to drop in 2022.
When asked what could be learned from the experience of the past two years, Ms Robertson expressed regret that in 2021 assessment had been crammed into the final term, saying “the assessment window was quite constrained” and it was “a very challenging and busy period, with perhaps more pressure on young people and the system than we would have liked”.
However, by the end of the evidence session - which ran for over two hours - it remained unclear how a similar situation is going to be avoided this year if schools and teachers are unable to gather evidence because the pandemic forces schools to close this winter.
When the Labour MSP and education spokesman Michael Marra asked if the exams could be cancelled in a particular local authority or school if it was experiencing severe disruption due to Covid-19, Ms Robertson said “we would be looking at a national exams process”.
She added that the exceptional circumstances service could be used, however, saying that could apply individually “for very particular reasons, but it can apply more broadly if a school or cohort of young people have been affected in a particular way”.
There was controversy around the decision in 2021 to remove the option of questioning grades based on “exceptional circumstances”.
However, the SQA argued that the evidence schools would usually submit to this service was already the basis for grading in 2021, given that the national exams had been cancelled.
