Questions over Higher History marking saga just won't stop coming

Pretty much since this year’s exam results were released, we’ve been reporting on an ongoing controversy over the way in which one of the papers was marked.

Teachers (including exam markers) accused the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) of “moving the goalposts” for Higher History by changing the marking standard after the exam had taken place.

The SQA insisted that this was false but then quietly opened an investigation into the matter. It was, however, carried out by a senior member of SQA staff and ended up being very, very late.

The report, which we were first told would be out by the end of September, was finally released on 6 November. In it, the SQA declared that there had been no problems with Higher History marking, that systems had worked as intended, and that the huge declines in pass rates and performance levels were just down to the pupils not being very good this year.

The Chief Executive said that the report was ‘robust and rigorous’ and the SQA also pointed out that it had asked another exam board – the Welsh Joint Education Committee (WJEC) – to ‘provide independent assurance that any conclusions reached were evidence-based and valid’.

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The SQA tried very, very hard to make this the point at which we all ‘draw a line’ under the issue, but it didn’t work – which is entirely unsurprising.

Instead, the criticism started almost immediately.

The Scottish Conservatives’ education spokesperson talked about a “whitewash”, while Labour’s Pam Duncan-Glancy was aghast that the SQA had “decided to try and blame pupils and teachers for what went wrong here.”

SNP MSP, and former government minister, Fergus Ewing said that the report seemed to be “more of an exercise in self-justification by the SQA than an honest attempt to answer legitimate and serious questions from children teachers and parents.” He also hit out at the lack of scrutiny to which quangos like the exam board tend to be subjected.  

But worse – far worse – was to come because we also started getting the reaction from History teachers.

They called the outcome, and the SQA’s conduct, “a disgrace” and a “gut punch” that had left teachers “confused and demoralised”. One Faculty Head was absolutely explicit that they would now seek to guide students away from taking Higher History and encourage them to instead consider subjects like Modern Studies, Geography and Politics, adding: “Those in charge of assessment have effectively destroyed the subject.”

A couple of teachers wrote a bit more extensively for us, laying out in considerable and damning detail their lack of faith in both the investigation that had been carried out and the SQA itself.

And it didn’t stop there, because questions were also soon being asked about the actual methodology behind the SQA’s investigation.

The Herald discovered that, during the course of the review, the only people interviewed were those with links to the SQA – specifically, the ‘senior appointees’ whose work was, we all thought, supposed to be the very thing being examined.

We also contacted the WJEC, who confirmed that the person providing the ‘independent’ oversight of the investigation had only spoken to two people: both of them senior SQA officials.

When challenged about all of this in parliament, First Minister John Swinney seemed determined, even desperate, to back the SQA – something that a number of people have told me felt an awful lot like what happened back in 2020, when he spent a week trying to defend the now-infamous exam algorithm that suppressed the grades of the pupils from the poorest areas in Scotland. He even went so far as to claim that a process of “peer review” had taken place.

But had it?

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One of the things we tried to clarify was what, exactly, the WJEC was endorsing, and what sort of processes had been followed as part of that work. We laid out the concerns that the review only involved interviews with SQA appointees, and explicitly asked if the endorsement they had offered also extended to this aspect of the methodology.

They told us that “the analysis supports the report’s conclusions” but refused to comment on the methodology or scope of the investigation. Those questions, they said, would have to be directed to the SQA, which says it stands by the work that was carried out and believes that it is robust and credible.

An SQA spokesperson said: “The Executive Director of Qualifications and Assessment at WJEC, an expert in standard setting in the context of national examinations, provided independent, external scrutiny and challenge of the review, including the evidence, conclusions and wider reflections. We provided Mr Harry [Richard Harry, WJEC executive director of qualifications and assessment] with whatever additional information he asked for to be able to undertake his work and he has publicly acknowledged the review team’s candour and openness to challenge through this process.”

The matter has now been taken up in parliament, with John Swinney told he has “questions to answer” and should “come clean”, and the education secretary under pressure to make a statement about the latest stage of the “saga”.

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The big question is this: is it reasonable to call an investigation ‘robust and rigorous’ when the person leading it (who works for the same organisation as the one accused of 'moving the goalposts') only interviewed people with something to lose from a negative outcome – specifically the marking team who would have been responsible for the conduct that had been alleged?

And, on a related note, is “peer review” an accurate description for a process that was not anonymous and that, so far as we know based on the public statements of those involved, did not involve full consideration of the methodology and processes that generated the evidence behind the report's conclusions?

So far, the answers to those questions certainly don’t seem to be resoundingly affirmative.