The gap we really need to close is the opportunity gap

It goes something like this: equality is giving everyone the same, but equity is recognising that not everyone starts out in the same place, so they need to be given more in order to ensure that everyone ends up in the same place. How close this comes to a fairly extreme version of socialism is for another day, and another column, although for a liberal like me it raises a red flag.

But I thought of the Vice-President this week, and of her desire for equality of outcome, upon the release of Scotland’s latest exam results, since it is what many in the educational establishment appear to crave.

There have been largely two strands of the response to the results. The first is that the fall in the overall pass rates across National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher, to roughly pre-pandemic levels, is a bad thing; a view ostensibly held by the Scottish Government.

READ MORE BY ANDY MACIVER

Benefits should be for people who need them, not for people who want them

New Tory leader’s job is to keep the corpse warm 

The second, and most prevalent, is that the small increase in the gap between the grades achieved by pupils from the most affluent areas and those from the poorest areas is unacceptable, and we must continue to work towards closing it.

It is never a particularly rewarding time of year to offer commentary on the education system but, wearing a digital tin hat, here I go; the response to the exams data, across the political and commentariat class, has been largely performative nonsense.

Let’s look, first, at the overall results. From National 5, through Higher, to Advanced Higher, three-quarters of all exam entries resulted in a pass, with grades A-C. If we work on the basis that academic examination is not merely a tick-box exercise, that the prospect of failure is an inherent part of the examination process, and that in order for the test to have any veracity a portion of candidates must fail, then three-quarters does not on the face of it appear to be an alarming statistic. Indeed, at levels approaching 90 per cent, as we saw during the Covid years, one started to wonder what the point was. If everyone passes, how do colleges, universities and employers differentiate?

That is an even more important question when we consider the proportion of A-grades achieved. In National 5, almost  four in 10 entries resulted in an A. At Higher and Advanced Higher, nearly one-third achieved an A. These proportions approached half during the Covid diets, which is frankly unhelpful and distorting. If half of all children are emerging with As, are we to believe that they are all the same? Of course they cannot be, so how do we differentiate between all these students with all these As?

For the purpose of comparison, let’s go back 25 years to 1999, the first year of devolution. In that year, in the National 5’s predecessor, the Standard Grade, fewer than one in five entries achieved a Grade 1. At Higher level, one in six entries resulted in an A; roughly half today’s proportion.

The desire at government level for constantly improving grades is entirely political and superficial, and has two important disadvantages. The first is that it is far more difficult for tertiary providers and employers to separate school-leavers according to ability. There is real-world evidence of this. At Scottish university medical schools, for instance, getting five As is no longer remotely enough to be offered a place. Because the examination system is failing to differentiate, the medical schools are having to do it themselves, creating layer upon layer of extra-curricular requirements and, deeply ironically, squeezing out would-be doctors from poorer backgrounds.

The second is that rising grades are seen as a proxy for rising standards. This is, self-evidently, completely wrong. As every available international study, backed up by anecdotal evidence from tertiary providers and employers shows, academic standards have constantly slipped during the last quarter century of grade inflation.

Equality of outcome in education is utterly undesirable. It is bad for society because it eliminates aspiration and obliterates the requirement for any kind of work ethic. And it is bad for the economy, because a mixed economy, which needs a varied workforce with variable skills and knowledge, also needs variable exam results.

If we were behaving in a nationally strategic way as opposed to a politically expedient way, we would be seeking to gradually reduce pass rates and, more importantly, A grades.

Now, if you think that is a thorny issue, it is positively tame compared to the discussion over the attainment gap. For this government in particular, it has become so central that nothing else appears to matter.

The focus should be on improving failing schools (Image: Shutterstock)

The impact has been perverse. In the absence of raising the level of those at the bottom, our education system has sought to reduce the gap by suppressing those at the top, creating a depressing but apparently desirable homogenous mediocrity.

It should be abandoned, and replaced with a drive to improve failing schools. For a child from a poor background, there is nothing more important than education as a means to lift them out of poverty, but there is nothing more preventative to that outcome than being stuck in a failing school in a poor catchment area.

The gap we need to close is not the attainment gap. In a free society, it will always be there. The gap we need to close is the opportunity gap between those who can either buy an independent school or buy a good catchment area, and those who can buy neither.

It is hard. It will take a long time. It is not superficially attractive to politicians in search of a short-term win. But as a tool to reduce poverty, it is second-to-none.