In quick succession this week, education secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville and first minister Nicola Sturgeon both repeated a quote from a Tes Scotland article published last month, using it to defend the way teachers are being asked to grade students this year: “No one has come up with a better way of doing it.”  

The quote is from the general secretary of School Leaders’ Scotland (SLS), Jim Thewliss, and featured in the first of our series of exclusives about this year’s exam papers being shared on social media. It was used first by Ms Somerville on Wednesday to defend the controversial “alternative certification model” (ACM), which is replacing national Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) exams this year, and then, the following day, by Ms Sturgeon when she came under fire at First Minister’s Questions over the way qualifications are being awarded.

Yet, in recent months Tes Scotland has run a series of articles that have not only highlighted the flaws with the ACM but also attempted to put forward some solutions.

WATCH: SQA and Education Scotland to be reformed

Also this week: I have full confidence in the SQA, says Nicola Sturgeon

SQA 2021: How will this year’s appeals process work in Scotland?

Survey: SQA assessment is unfair in 2021, say most teachers

One big change that teachers have argued for is a better balance between “demonstrated attainment” and “inferred attainment”, an approach that would truly allow teachers to bring to bear their expertise, professional judgment and knowledge of their students.

SQA assessment 2021: Flaws in the system replacing exams

In 2020, teachers were ultimately able to base a student’s result on “demonstrated and inferred attainment” but that approach is explicitly not allowed this year - demonstrated attainment is the only game in town, which is why students returning after Easter faced a deluge of assessment. If teachers are assigning a grade, they must have several pieces of evidence to base it on, and there are strict criteria about what counts as quality evidence.

So, while schools have been being told that they don’t have to run prelims or exams, they are also being told that “evidence that is similar to a course assessment will have stronger predictive value than evidence that is considerably different from the course assessment”.

Seamus Searson, general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers Association (SSTA), has been prominent in arguing for teachers not to be forced to “tie themselves in knots gathering evidence,” but instead to be given the flexibility to make sure students get the grades they deserve.

Making the case, he uses the example of the literacy and numeracy Scottish Standardised National Assessments (SNSA). Pupils sit these tests in P1, P4, P7 and S3, but how they perform on the online assessment is not the be-all and end-all. The tests are used to inform the teacher’s judgement, but the teacher still has scope to bring their own knowledge of the child to bear in determining the level they are working at. The same approach, Mr Searson says, should be taken to grading for the national qualifications this year. 

Worryingly, a recent SSTA survey of 1,700 teachers found that only 36 per cent believed that the evidence that they had collected truly demonstrated their students’ attainment. 

Tes Scotland raised teachers’ concerns - that they are not free this year to bring their expertise to bear - directly with Ms Sturgeon on 11 May, but she insisted that results would be based on teacher professional judgement.

Then, this week, the Scottish Conservatives’ shadow minister for children and young people, Meghan Gallacher, a new MSP for the Central region, raised the issue in the Scottish Parliament, only to be told by Ms Somerville that she was “in danger of splitting hairs”.

Getting a better balance between inferred and demonstrated attainment was also the main change advocated by a Scottish depute headteacher in a blog, an edited version of which was featured on the Tes Scotland website. The headline of that article, incidentally, was How to avoid a repeat of the 2020 results debacle - so much for alternatives not being offered

The school leader also said that teachers should be allowed to use a “genuinely broad range of evidence, without the threat of coming after them for it”.

Meanwhile, the EIS teaching union made the case back in March for cancelling certification of qualifications for students who were not leaving school. The union warned the current plans could be “undeliverable” and said that cancelling certification for all S4 students staying on in school would free up teachers to concentrate on S5 and S6 students.

So, alternatives have been put forward by teachers and unions and the key problems with the ACM have also been raised by politicians and journalists. Just yesterday the Green’s education spokesperson, Ross Greer, had another stab at explaining the problem to Ms Somerville in a parliamentary education debate, during which reform of the SQA and the Education Scotland was promised, just two hours after Ms Sturgeon had said she had confidence in the SQA.

Mr Greer said: “The SQA and the government insist that this year’s process is based on teacher judgment, but that is fundamentally untrue. The reality of the alternative certification model is that exams in all but name have taken place, with the burden of setting and marking them falling on teachers without their being given the professional autonomy fully to exercise their own judgment.”

It is the National Qualifications 2021 Group - which is made up of education directors, school leaders, the EIS teaching union and the SQA, among others - that was charged with coming up with a way of assessing students when the exams were cancelled in December.

Various members of that group will readily concede that the ACM is not perfect and, of course, it was never going to be. However, they also admit that it became even more flawed when schools closed after the Christmas holidays, because the window during which teachers could gather evidence was slashed when another lengthy Covid lockdown was enforced.

But surely in a pandemic, when schools had already been forced to close once, planning for a second round of closures would have been prudent - so why was there no alternative to the alternative certification model?

Teachers have come up with better solutions than what is currently playing out - but the critical question is, why hasn’t the National Qualifications 2021 Group, the body that was charged with doing so?