Students failed by a system getting back to normal

There are always those keen to tell young people that exams grades don’t really matter, and they’ll find their way in life regardless – but they very obviously do matter, otherwise we wouldn’t bother with the whole system. Results might not shut off any particular route forevermore, but the letters on that certificate still have a huge impact on the lives of those receiving them.

These days, students can ask for their results to be issued digitally, either by text message or email, meaning that they don’t need to wait for their postie to get around to dropping the big envelope through their front door. Thousands sign up for this service which allows them to trade hours of desperation for a more concentrated type of terror early in the morning.

But this year, something went badly wrong.

The SQA hold a briefing for journalists on the morning on results day, and while I was on my way there I started to receive messages on social media telling me about a problem with the results emails. It wasn’t that they hadn’t arrived – the issue was that they had been sent out with a big gap where the actual results information should have been.

To me, this looked like a problem with whatever system the SQA had used to generate the mass emails – the sort of thing you’d rather expect a major national organisation to sort out in advance, of course. But I’m not a teenager anxiously waiting to find out if my plans for the coming years are intact or in tatters.

For many young people, that email would have read, however briefly, as confirmation of their worst fears: that they had completely failed every single one of their exams.

By the time I and my colleagues shuffled into a meeting room to meet with various SQA officials, we were being told that the matter had been resolved, although those same officials either could not, or would not, actually tell us what had gone so badly wrong – the closest we got was being told that there was a problem with an external supplier.

But even by that stage, damage would have been done.

Imagine how it feels to be a sixteen year old in those circumstances, your heart thudding and fingers shaking as you open up what feels, at that moment, like the most important email you will ever receive, only to see that blank space.

And for some things may have been even worse. I’m aware of some students who knew that they had passed, despite the blank email, because they received a message from UCAS confirming their university place for the coming year. The implication of that, however, is that some young people might have found out that they hadn’t done well under similar circumstances.

The SQA officials were asked about all of this pretty much immediately and, to be honest, I didn’t really get the feeling that they understood the gravity of their organisation’s failure. But that’s hardly a surprise, is it?

Remember, this is an organisation that was deemed to be so dysfunctional, and that had lost the trust of pupils, teachers and politicians so completely, that the SNP decided that they were going to abolish it.

Those promises have, as we all know, been watered down since, and nobody is expecting anything other than a rebrand anymore (with the same people running the show, by the way) but it’s worth taking a moment to remind ourselves that the SQA, the only exam body in Scotland, is a demonstrably incompetent organisation that, in recent years, has let down young people again and again and again and again.

And the problems this year don’t even stop there – we’ve not even gotten to the actual results yet.

First of all, an important point: students all over the country did brilliantly and deserve to celebrate that.

What’s more, teachers and lecturers once again performed miracles and deserve our gratitude.

But have a look at National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher stats and you see the same pattern: pass rates have fallen and the attainment gap has risen.

The government and their supporters are valiantly trying to spin this as being just a return to pre-pandemic norms, and that we’re really just getting back to normal, but that’s not really the case.

Yes, the lower Higher pass rate is the same as the figure for 2019, and the attainment gap is within a couple of percentage points, but proportion of students successfully achieving an A-C had already been falling for years by that point, and the attainment had also been increasing year on year.

At National 5 the pass rate is now lower than it has ever been, while the attainment gap is at its highest recorded level, and the same is true of Advanced Higher.

That would all be bad enough, but you also have to remember that young people have no real appeals system to fall back on any more. They can ask for their paper to be reviewed, but all that does is ensure that the SQA hasn’t made a mess of the marking process – there is absolutely no facility for a student who has produced brilliant work all year, and who has genuinely just had one bad day (or, in fact, a few bad hours), to ask the SQA to consider any alternative evidence.

That unfairness affects everyone, but with pass rates falling and attainment gaps widening, it will have the biggest impact on those from the poorest communities.

In that sense, it’s true to say we’re very much back to normal.

And that’s a serious indictment of the whole system and the people who run it.