Today around 145,000 people received their results. SQA results day is mainly – and rightly - one of celebration for the rewards of hard work of young people and the staff who support them to achieve their best. Though, due to an error in the SQA sending out results via email, many people will still be awaiting the postie to bring them their results.

And while the results that people receive today to not define them, they are of fundamental importance to the next phase of individuals’ lives. For school leavers today’s results are crucial for access to further and higher education, training or employment opportunities and for those staying at school, today’s results will define the access that they have to subjects in the next academic year. It is important to set out that there is No Wrong Path, but it is also important to understand on a systemic level, that journey is easier for some when you get the results you ‘need’, at the first time of asking.

Today is important for another reason. Because Scottish education is what Professor Lindsay Paterson describes as a ‘data desert’, the annual publication of qualification results is the only annual set of statistics (not based on judgements) that is published that allows us to assess the performance of the education system. The Scottish Government dismantled objective studies – such as the Scottish Literacy and Numeracy Survey – and never replaced it with anything similar, leaving Scottish education with very little means on which to measure performance.

 

Trends in Attainment

Attainment is down for all at National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher level. Simply, these results are – as the Herald’s own Education writer James McEnaney has said – disastrous.

Assessing the trends in recent years of attainment comes with a major health warning. Due to the pandemic exams were cancelled in 2020 and 2021, and in 2022 and 2023 there were adjustments (such as there being no coursework) to the courses and to the way that marking was done. This year, there has been much more of a return to ‘normal’ – both in terms of coursework and grading approach – meaning this years results are more directly comparable with 2019 (the final pre-pandemic year) than any year since then.

Today’s results show that attainment at Higher – our ‘gold standard’ qualification - is 74.9%. This is equal to 2019 and is the lowest level since the new qualification was introduced in 2015. It follows the fact that the pass rate dropped in each of the four consecutive years from 2016 to 2019.

At National 5 the pass rate is 77.2, which is also the lowest on record since that qualification replaced the Standard Grade.

At Advanced Higher the pass rate has collapsed to 75.3%. Down from 80.2 last year, and 79.6% in 2019.

As one teacher posed to me this morning ‘has Curriculum for Excellence delivered excellence?’. On these figures the answer cannot be anything but a resounding no.

The Poverty Related Attainment Gap

One of the key focuses of today’s analysis is what it tells us about educational inequality, which is incredibly stark in Scotland and has today once again increased.

The comparison of results between the richest and the poorest pupils are known as the  ‘poverty-related attainment gap’. In 2016, the Scottish Government said they ‘should be judged’ on their record in closing this gap. They committed to eliminating it by 2026, and the current Education Secretary has stated that goal is still the Government’s ‘ambition’.

At Higher level, the attainment gap has increased to 17.1 percentage points between the least and most deprived fifth of young people.

The pass rate for the least deprived individuals is now 82.2%. Down from 84% last year. The pass rate for the most deprived is 65.1%, down from 68% last year.

The attainment gap at National 5 level is 15.5 percentage points, broadly similar to 15.6 last year, and has reduced since 2019 when it was 17 pp.

Attainment down; inequality up. Alarm bells should be ringing.

 

The shadow of the pandemic

What today’s results mean is that the culmination of twenty years of continuous education reform in Scotland, ten years of it being self-defined as the Government’s ‘number one priority’, and billions of pounds of spending focused on the Scottish Attainment Challenge is falling pass rates for all and widening education inequality.

It is important to note that today’s figures show a reversion to the trends of 2019. And, despite claims that have been made that the pandemic is solely to blame for the situation we find ourselves in, the gap was not closing in the years prior to 2020. Pass rates in those years were falling, and inequality was widening. Today, we have returned to that ‘old normal’.

Yet, at the same time, of course the disruption of the pandemic continues to impact those at school. There was no inevitability about this. Anyone working in schools will tell you there has been a complete absence of support since Covid to deal with its consequences. The Scottish Government did not make the resources that were needed available and even voted against independently researching the scale of disruption to attainment that was caused. The recent PISA figures showed that there were a number of countries where the trend in falling attainment since the pandemic has not been experienced.

It seems the Government did nothing, and now is all out of ideas.

There will be more analysis to come in the coming days and weeks. In the meantime, we can only hope there is a reflection and assessment of the situation from policymakers. In the year ahead schools are facing cuts to staffing numbers, fewer resources available to them, ongoing issues with attendance in classrooms, and further structural reform that isn’t in line with the findings of Independent Reviews. That is not a recipe to change these trends.