Scottish exams off for a second year as Swinney cancels Highers
ALL exams i n Scottish schools will be cancelled for a second year after concerns about pupils falling behind.
Education Secretary John Swinney yesterday confirmed that Higher and Advanced Highers will not go ahead next year.
He said the decision was made after concerns that they would be unfair for pupils who missed classes because of Covid outbreaks.
It follows the decision to cancel National 5 exams in October.
However, critics said that more could have been done to allow the exams to go ahead.
Announcing the controversial move, Mr Swinney said: ‘I will not stake the future of our Higher pupils – whether they get a place at college, university, training or work – on a lottery of whether their school was hit by Covid.
‘ Exams cannot account f or differential loss of learning and could lead to unfair results for our poorest pupils. This could lead to pupils’ f utures being blighted through no fault of their own. That is simply not fair.’
He also raised concerns that failing to cancel exams may impact on efforts to cut the attainment gap.
In Oct o b e r, Mr S wi n n e y announced that Highers and Advanced Highers would be pushed back and begin on May 13 to allow students who missed teaching time due to the pandemic to catch up.
But he said at the time that contingency plans would be developed for the cancellation of exams.
Yesterday, he told MSPs: ‘ The prospects for public health have been improved immeasurably due to the development of a vaccine but we know that it will, unavoidably, take time to be rolled out.
‘And, already, pupils have lost significant learning time.’
He highlighted that almost 40 per cent of S4 pupils who were not in school for more than one-fifth of class time have been from the poorest communities, as well as 33 per cent in S5 and 26 per cent in S6.
Warning that further disruption cannot be ruled out, he said: ‘ In light of this, the question is less whether we can hold the exams safely i n the spring and more whether we can do so fairly.’
All awards will be based on ‘teacher judgment of evidence of learner attainment’, he said, pledging ‘no algorithm’ would be used.
Jo Bisset, organiser f or the UsForThem Scotland parents group, said: ‘This is an inexcusably bad decision which will have a terrible impact on children’s future.’
She added: ‘The fact the Scottish Government couldn’t get its act together and run an exams diet tells you exactly how seriously the system takes children’s interests in the short, medium and long term.’
Yesterday’s decision follows a similar move by the Welsh Government to cancel its exam diet for 2021 in November. But the UK Government has confirmed exams in England will go ahead in May.
Scottish Conservative education spokesman Jamie Greene criticised the ‘months of dither and delay’ before making the announcement, which he described as an ‘admission of complete failure’.
Leading education expert Lindsay Paterson, professor of education policy at Edinburgh University, said his ‘preferred option’ would have been to allow exams to go ahead with extra support in place to allow pupils to study at home.
Scottish Labour’s education spokesman Iain Gray said: ‘These decisions make sense, but yet again, they are made very, very late.’
EIS teaching union general secretary Larry Flanagan said: ‘The EIS has every confidence in the ability of teachers to make professional judgments based on pupil evidence and, in the circumstances, believes that cancelling the exam diet in favour of an alternative model is the correct decision, one which could have been made earlier.
‘We have raised repeatedly, however, the additional workload burden which this will generate.’
Meanwhile, Mr Swinney confirmed students’ return to university after the Christmas break will be staggered over at least six weeks.
The aim is to avoid a repeat of Covid outbreaks that hit student accommodation earlier this year.
‘Terrible impact on children’s future’