The Higher pass rates are going down every year.. you don’t have to be an A-grade maths student to know that some tough questions need to be asked of the SQA
Higher result pass rates in Scotland fallen have for the fourth successive year, it emerged last week. Here, Scottish Greens education spokesman Ross Greer argues that an immediate inquiry is needed to find out why
For young people, their parents and guardians, exams results day can be devastating, joyous or anything in between.
For teachers, it can be every point on the emotional spectrum at once, as they console and congratulate in equal measure.
On TV and across social media, it’s an odd spectacle.
Even with careful selection, there’s no guarantee the pupils chosen to open their results in front of news crews will get what they expect.
And while thousands take to Facebook to celebrate, for those who are disappointed, that often adds to the upset or embarrassment they feel.
Success is worth celebrating and there was plenty of it last week.
The pass rate for National 5 maths, for example, was up 4.4 per cent.
And there were some notable individual successes, including Somer Bakhsh from Springburn, Glasgow, who bagged four Higher As and a B despite living under threat of deportation to Pakistan, where his life is in danger.
Across the country, thousands of students have achieved what they needed to take the next step in their life. They’ve earned it and deserve congratulations.
Exam results do not define us. Much has been done in recent years to ditch the narrative that going straight from school to university is the definition of success, but there’s still work to do.
We need to break down the unhelpful stereotypes around college and apprenticeships, especially in the eyes of some parents.
For those looking for that place at university, though, those Higher results really matter. So how did this year’s Highers go?
The headline stat on Tuesday was 74.8 per cent, the pass rate for the 185,914 pupils sitting Highers.
It was notable because for the first time since the new Higher was introduced in 2015, it fell below 75 per cent.
Last year it was 76.8 per cent. This is not concrete proof of the demise of Scotland’s once world-leading education system. For a start, a qualification only four years old could simply still be settling in.
John Swinney and the SQA described the decline as a “fluctuation”. It’s perfectly fair to say that pass rates going up and down year by year is normal.
The Government’s problem is that Higher pass rates aren’t going up and down. They’re only going down, every year.
As any Higher maths student can tell you, that’s not fluctuation, it’s a clear trend. What the Deputy First Minister and the exam authority should be asking is whether this downward trend is something to worry about or if it is just the system settling.
It’s the SQA’s job to interrogate questions like this, even if it doesn’t want to.
Exam bosses should immediately launch an inquiry into this decline and present their findings to Parliament before the end of the year.
For now, the idea of the system just settling in is an assertion. What we need is evidence. That’s because there are equally compelling suggestions that real problems in the system are causing this decline.
Teacher shortages in specific subjects mean classes being covered by supply staff who don’t know the subject.
Pupils I spoke to at one school were clear that the conveyor belt of supply staff was, in their view, harming their chances of getting the grades they are capable of.
The length of some exams is also a candidate for investigation.
Swinney, quite rightly, got rid of unit assessments throughout the year but the SQA’s response was simply to make the exams longer.
This is compounded for students with additional support needs, who already get more time. In some cases, 15 and 16-year-olds took three-and-a-half hour exams.
In addition, the impact of cuts, particularly on subjects needing extra resources (such as for science experiments), the unequal narrowing of the curriculum (pupils sit between five and eight Nat 5s, depending on the school) and the dozens of other factors flagged up by teachers all show why brushing this aside as “fluctuation” is not responsible.
Higher pass rates are at their lowest since 2012. We need to know why. It’s the SQA’s responsibility to tell us and it’s John Swinney’s responsibility to make sure it does its job.
Higher pass rates aren’t going up and down. They are only going down, every year