This article appears as part of the Lessons to Learn newsletter.

There’s only one big story in Scottish education this week – the publication of the 2024 exam results. 

Unfortunately the day got off to yet another shambolic start as it emerged that thousands of results emails were showing a blank space where the grades should have been. 

Then, when the results actually arrived, they looked disastrous. As we reported on Tuesday morning, pass rates have fallen and attainment gaps have increased compared to previous years. Writing for The Herald, researcher and analyst Barry Black argued that ‘alarm bells should be ringing’. 

But some people say things aren’t so bad, and that results have simply returned to the levels that we saw pre-pandemic. We have, they argue, just returned to normal – so what’s the problem? 

Is that really true? 

Well, yes – but only if you take the narrowest possible view of the available data and ignore all the evidence that you find inconvenient. 

How do 2024 results compare with 2019 exam data? 

If you look exclusively at Higher level, then both the pass rate and the attainment gap look the same now as they did just before Covid hit. 

In 2019 the Higher pass rate was 74.8% and the attainment gap was 16.9 percentage points – now the pass rate is 74.9% with an attainment gap of 17.1 percentage points.

That certainly seems to support the assertion that results have simply returned to pre-pandemic norms. 

But what happens when we look a bit more closely? 

First of all, we find that the situation isn’t quite as clear at National 5 level, because although the attainment gap is about the same as it was just before the pandemic – it was 17 percentage points in 2019 and is 17.2 percentage points now – the pass rate has fallen from 78.3 percent to 77.2%. 

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And it’s even worse when you consider Advanced Higher. At this level, we see a significant drop in the pass rate – from 79.6% in 2019 to 75.3% in 2024 – while the attainment gap has grown from 13.2 percentage points to 15.5 percentage points. 

So while Higher exam results data looks to be much the same as the figures from 2019, this is less true for National 5 and not at all true for Advanced Higher. 

But even that isn’t the whole story. 

What happens if we look at pass rates for the full pre-pandemic period? 

While some are desperate to defend the 2024 results by pointing exclusively at 2019, the data from the final year before Covid hit is not, in fact, an accurate reflection of the broader pre-pandemic period. 

In order to assess whether or not exam outcomes have returned to pre-pandemic norms, we actually need to look right back to 2016. This is when the current qualifications had been fully introduced and the previous versions removed, so it makes sense to compare the latest exam data with the picture from 2016-2019 if we want to understand how the 2024 results compare to pre-pandemic success rates and attainment gaps.

But there’s a reason the government and the SQA don’t want to do this. 

During the actual pre-pandemic period of 2016-2019, the pass rates at National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher all fell; at the same time, the gaps between rich and poor got bigger and bigger. 

At National 5 level, the pass rate fell from 79.5% in 2016 to 78.3% in 2019. 

For Highers, the pass rate fell from 77.6% in 2016 to 74.8% in 2019. 

And when it comes to Advanced Higher, the pass rate dropped from 82% in 2016 to 79.6% in 2019.

For all three courses, the 2024 pass rate is either lower than or equal to the lowest recorded figure for the 2016-2019 pre-pandemic period.

And what about attainment gaps? 

Attainment gaps measure the difference in pass rates between pupils from the most affluent 20% of Scotland and those from the most deprived 20%. Since 2015, the SNP has been promising to close the attainment gap in Scottish education, but from 2016 – 2019 the numbers were moving entirely in the wrong direction. 

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In the pre-pandemic period, the National 5 attainment gap increased from 15.4 percentage points to 17 percentage points, while the gap at Higher level rose from 14.6 percentage points to 16.9 percentage points. So although the 2024 levels are similar to those seen in 2019, that actually means that the latest attainment gaps are demonstrably higher than most of the pre-pandemic period.

The increasing gap was even more pronounced at Advanced Higher, where it jumped from 8.7 percentage points in 2016 to 13.2 percentage points in 2016. By 2024, this has jumped again to 15.5 percentage points, making this figure much worse than those seen pre-pandemic.

So what is really going on? 

When we look at the full picture, it is beyond doubt that the 2024 exam results data is worse than comparable data from the pre-pandemic period. 

Sure, some of the stats look similar to those seen in the year immediately before Covid hit, but when we pay attention to what was going on in terms of pass rates and attainment gaps, and look at the evidence going back to 2016, it soon becomes clear that the overall situation is now worse than it was in the pre-pandemic era.