We have finally almost arrived at SQA results day 2021, after a year for teachers like no other.

But what was it like to be a teacher in a year when, after the Covid pandemic ultimately led to the cancellation of all national exams, an “alternative certification model” (ACM) had to be hastily prepared?

In a feature for the latest issue of Tes Scotland magazine, seven teachers told us what it had been like to go through a year of the ACM.

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Long read: What teachers really think about the ACM

While 2020-21 appears to have been singularly stressful for almost everyone, amid all the widely held concerns about the ACM there were also some positives.

Here is a flavour of what each of the seven teachers told us:

School leaders

“It was obvious that, no matter how hard we tried, there was little consistency in the ACM between schools. The main victims in all this were our pupils: stressed, disorientated, over-tested and under-supported by a system they had no part in making, in which their voices were not heard.”

“This year, it felt that teachers were caught in a dangerous middle zone: we were not sure how our grading would be checked, parents might be unhappy and politicians might blame grade inflation on teachers.”

Classroom teachers

“As if 2020-21 wasn’t brutal enough, it ended with schools being fobbed off with an “alternative certification model”. The official line was that there were “no exams”. In reality, we did have exams but administered in a much less efficient way by already swamped teachers.”

“I have been an SQA marker for some years yet was constantly questioning my judgements...How on earth have our probationers, NQTs and single-staff departments coped? Considering the numbers signed off on stress this year, I fear the answer is that they simply didn’t.”

“I believe the system worked as well as it could, with most pupils receiving the grades their performance over the year merited. Grading pupils turned out to be time-consuming yet manageable. I have been marking for the SQA for around 10 years and, presumably, this experience made the process cleaner for me. I can imagine other teachers without that background might have struggled here.”

“As a teacher, you do everything you can for your pupils but, during this past year, we have been forced to align ourselves with an ACM that did not have their best interests at heart. For some, final grades were decided through the sitting of exams that supposedly weren’t exams; for others, it was simply a matter of preparing answers to exam questions that had been plastered over social media platforms such as TikTok.”

“Although this academic year was stressful in many ways, the ACM, for me, wasn’t an aspect of that. I hope, as we consider what our exams system will look like in the future, we move away from an archaic process of assessment and focus on personalised learning - enabling a new confidence in teacher judgement and innovation in our classrooms. We were given ownership this year to really shape our process and it would be sad to remove that now.”

*Subscribers can read the full “What teachers really think about the ACM” feature here. To subscribe to Tes Scotland magazine, click here.