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

You will, I’m sure, already have seen lots about the 2024 exam results.

The headline figures are bad. Pass rates are down and attainment gaps are at record levels. Things are now worse than they were before the pandemic.

Last weekend I also had a look at some of the lesser-noticed details in the exam data, breaking down things like entry levels for non-traditional courses, progress rates between National 4 and National 5, and the reality for pupils with additional support needs and disabilities. You can read all of that here.

As part of that story I examined the changing pass rates for different subjects at Higher to find out which had seen the biggest declines. There are a few different ways to look at the issue but what I noticed was that, no matter how you cut it, History seems to be a cause for concern – not least because the Higher pass rate has dropped by 13 percentage points in a single year.

The SQA publishes information about the average scores for different parts of each exam, so it is actually possible to drill down a little bit further into this problem. When you do, you see that the national average score for Paper 2 in Higher History – the exam paper dealing with Scottish history – fell by more than 25% in just twelve months. In paper 1, the drop was 18%.

When TES Scotland asked the SQA about the falling pass rate for the subject they were told that there was nothing wrong with the exam paper – there had just been a “drop in learners’ performance”.

But does that actually make any sense?

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For the SQA’s assertion to be true, one of two things would have had to have happened.

1) Students across Scotland suddenly became dramatically less capable of answering exam questions, but only in very specific areas and subjects.

or

2) Teachers across Scotland suddenly became dramatically less capable of teaching a key part of the course that they have been delivering for years.

Both of those things are just about possible – but likely? Obviously not.


Fortunately there’s another, far more believable explanation – and this one has the advantage of coming from a whole range of current teachers and even SQA markers.

They say that the SQA moved the goalposts for marking the papers, making it more difficult for students to gain marks than has been the case before now. What’s more, they say that the SQA gave them no warning whatsoever for this because the change happened after the exam had taken place, and warned that it wouldn’t even show up when the marking schemes are eventually released.

Specifically, teachers (including people who marked this year and were in the meetings being discussed) tell me that the people in charge seemed to have made a decision that, for whatever reason, students would have to give more detail this year in order to get marks for their responses.

The SQA has now issued a statement to schools saying that the marking instructions and exam difficulty didn’t change, but that’s not at all the point. The issue is that the interpretation and application of those marking instructions led to a significant change in approach compared to previous years – and that, just to be absolutely clear, is coming from teachers who actually marked this year’s exam.

Now, it may well be the case that students should have to give the level of detail demanded this year, but that’s not the issue. They haven’t had to do so before now, and teachers have taught their courses on that basis. Changing something like this, which might look unimportant but is actually absolutely critical to the entire marking approach, absolutely should not be done on the fly.

And it certainly shouldn’t be done after more than ten thousand History students have already sat their exam.

But the problems clearly go deeper than just the unfair marking of a single year’s exam papers.

Again and again I have been told that the culture at the SQA in general, and around the History team in particular, is appalling. Current and past markers say that those in charge do not tolerate questions or challenges and that this has been an increasing problem under the current leadership.

Of course, anyone who knows anything about the SQA may be unsurprised by all this. After all, this is a fundamentally unreliable organisation that was deemed so dysfunctional it had to be abolished. It has failed young people for years and now it’s failing them again. Plus ça change and all that.

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But what about the Scottish Government?

I decided to ask them if Jenny Gilruth would intervene given the concerns of whistleblowers from her former profession. Would she step in to protect students from this ‘unfair’ exam situation?

The answer is that she will instead let the SQA staff mark its own homework. Oh and don’t worry, the organisation is being rebranded ‘reformed’.

But it makes you wonder: what exactly is the point in having a former teacher as Education Secretary if even now she won’t act?

When she was appointed, a lot of the enthusiasm from teachers was based on the idea that she would ‘get it’, and that when things like this happened – especially when it involved the SQA! – she’d be able to really understand what was wrong and set about fixing it.

The exam board might be able to fob off government officials and press officers by telling them that there’s ‘nothing to see here’, but surely Gilruth would see through the spin just like teachers do?

If so, it turns out that it doesn’t make a difference.

My guess would be that Jenny Gilruth understands this about as well as the desperate and outraged History teachers who have been contacting me.

She’s just choosing not to hear them.