I was a headteacher of a state school in England during the tenure of Michael Gove as education secretary there. Every year my colleagues and I would temper the joys and disappointments of results days by finding mordant humour in the secretary of state’s comments about that year’s exam performance.

If grades were up, there was some chance that he would congratulate students on their achievements, but it was more likely he would be slamming exams as “too easy”. If grades were down, there was as much chance he would be slamming schools for failing as there was that he would be congratulating himself for making exams “tougher”. Sometimes, of course, he did both.

There was precious little humour of any kind available to temper the disappointments of this Tuesday’s results day in Scotland. Even though the very real achievements of many thousands of students were justly recognised, too many others emerged from the day with their hopes shattered and their futures uncertain.

Too many teachers felt demoralised and undermined because the estimated grades they had worked long and hard to provide seemed in the end to count for nothing. How could the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) know their students’ abilities better than they?

The SQA results controversy

Tuesday provided another cruel example of how the pandemic has exposed long-standing weaknesses in systems about which it hasn’t ever before suited anyone to think too deeply. For example, over generations, we’ve colluded with the fiction that if you perform to a certain standard you will inevitably be rewarded with a certain grade. But that has never been the whole story. Grades have always been moderated to “maintain confidence in the system”. Looked at bleakly, what goes on in the examination hall is simply the process of deciding who gets which of the available grades on offer.

Also today: Students protest against ‘completely unfair’ SQA results

SQA protests: I could have joined protest, admits Sturgeon

Results day 2020: ‘Sense of injustice on a whole other level’

Analysis: SQA exam system ‘has largely maintained the status quo’

In a sense, this year has seen a working out in public view of a process that goes on every year behind closed doors. In changing the estimated grades of teachers, SQA was not saying that they were necessarily wrong, merely that they didn’t fit the expected pattern.

The SQA methodology paper drew attention to another weakness we have long chosen to ignore. This summer young people elsewhere in the UK will receive grades that are benchmarked against a rich longitudinal dataset providing extra validation for the process, even in these extraordinary circumstances. But not here. Few would advocate the methods used to obtain assessment data in England, but Scotland is a small enough country for a national pupil dataset to be a really powerful tool for educational improvement, and so surely we could be clever enough to collect robust data in a way that is educationally enlightened.

The lack of transparency that has heightened this week’s outrage is also nothing new. I have previously drawn attention to the anomaly that the SQA is the only exams body in the UK that shields itself behind exemptions in freedom of information and data protection legislation to deny candidates and their teachers access to examination scripts.

The return of scripts is routine (and free) elsewhere and provides valuable professional development material, a check on inappropriate use of the appeals system and is the ultimate in quality assurance. Surely it is now obvious how confidence in a qualifications system is directly proportional to its transparency.

But if SQA needs to be more transparent, it also needs to be more independent. I do not doubt that throughout the process that led to Tuesday’s publication of results, everyone at the SQA was working with the best interests of young people at heart. I know SQA staff to be knowledgeable, courteous, helpful and professional. I am, therefore, sure that they would have understood the risks that were inherent in the unprecedented task they were asked by government to undertake. What is not clear is whether they were able to speak truth to power to try to avoid a foreseeable outcome.

It is really not healthy for the SQA to be an arm of government, the arbiter of standards and the monopoly provider of national qualifications all at the same time. Those who have spent this week criticising the SQA could usefully turn some of their attention to the political and governance context within which it operates.

But one weakness is the most profound: our collusion in encouraging young people to value their worth and their future potential in terms of gaining (or failing to gain) a set of alphanumerical grades at a particular point in their young adulthood. The most tragic voices in the media on Tuesday were those whose anger could not hide their despair. This year it has been more obvious and more raw but this, again, is what happens unseen every year.

Having a set of examinations stretched out like tripwires in the path of every young person may have suited a past age when careers were linear and expectations of some sections of society were low. But today we need everyone to strive for excellence and be comfortable in finding different paths to success, taking account of who they are and the challenges and opportunities that life affords them.

I would not be driving today if I had been given only one chance to pass my test when I was 17. Yet that is still essentially how we give (or deny) young people access to their own futures.

On Tuesday, Scotland’s education secretary, John Swinney, joined the roster of politicians having it both ways on results day by saying that a process that had disproportionately reduced the grades of children in more deprived areas provided evidence of the government’s success in closing the poverty-related attainment gap. That he was probably technically correct shows the pointlessness of that kind of political discourse.

Words are easy, blame is a distraction. The scale of the current crisis demands action. We need to deal with the weaknesses we’ve been ignoring with courage, honesty and wisdom.

Melvyn Roffe is principal of George Watson’s College in Edinburgh