You failed our and it’s utterly
Ex-FM calls for action as poorer areas marked down
Jack McConnell has called on Education Secretary John Swinney to quit if he can’t begin fixing the exam scandal within a week.
The ex-First Minister, a former maths teacher, launched a blistering attack on the “utterly unforgivable” grade moderation that has seen the marks of pupils in the poorest areas “disproportionately driven down” compared to the most affluent.
The Scottish Government is facing a backlash after it emerged grades predicted by teachers for exams cancelled by coronavirus had been moderated by marking body the Scottish Qualifications Authority’s (SQA) using the past performance of schools.
It has resulted in those in the most deprived zones being downgraded by 15.2 per cent compared with just 6.9 per cent in the wealthiest.
McConnell, now a House of Lords peer, said: “The treatment of the children in the schools where there is the highest levels of depravation is absolutely disgraceful.
“These aren’t statistics that have been manufactured by politicians or reporters.
These are the SQA’s own statistics that show they’ve disproportionately driven down the grades of kids from deprived areas and that is just utterly unforgivable.
“Education is the No1 route for these kids out of their social circumstances into a better life. To have taken that away from thousands of them cannot be allowed to stand.
“Given that the exams didn’t happen– and that everyone knew there was a system in place that might be f lawed – the education agencies should have been all over this.
“Ministers should have been looking at it in great detail over the summer and they just weren’t.
“I don’t understand whether it’s laziness or a couldn’t- care- less mentality or just bad judgment but ministers were not on top of this.
“As a result, young people will lose university places.
“They’ll lose job opportunities and be mentally scarred.
“There needs to be an intervention within the next week to review some of the scaling down at some of the schools where it’s most obviously a problem.
“All options need to be considered but, at the end of the day, Scotland has about 400 secondary schools. It wouldn’t be hard to review this, school by school, quickly and identify the particular problems. They need to do this proactively, they can’t just wait for the kids to appeal.
“There needs to be a review immediately that identifies clusters of problems and then does something about them.”
McConnell was appointed Scotland’s education secretary in October 2000 at the height of another major SQA
This needs fixed quickly, if not someone must pay price
exam scandal, when thousands of pupils received incorrect results.
Within weeks, the former MSP for Motherwell and Wishaw put in place a new SQA board with 16 of its 24 members replaced.
He added: “After the exam fiasco 20 years ago, when my job was to sort it out, I was getting weekly reports of the progress.
“Every single problem that occurred was drawn to my attention and discussed, and I was reassured that solutions had been found.
“We went through the analysis of how things were shaping up as it came closer and closer to results day for 2001. That just doesn’t seem to be happening this time around.”
When asked whether Swinney should consider his position, McConnell added: “The first duty for ministers is to fix this but if they can’t, they need to be held accountable.
“I was conscious in 2000 that I had been given a job to fix the system and if I failed to do that, I would have felt a duty to go. This needs fixed quickly and someone needs to take responsibility and pay the price if it’s not.
“I’ve heard lots of criticism of the decision- making at the top of the education system in the last few months when I was campaigning to get the schools reopened – but even I didn’t think that it was this bad.
“I’m astonished nobody saw this coming. I don’t know whether they saw it and thought they had come up with a line to sell to the public that everyone saw through immediately or whether they just weren’t doing the work and didn’t spot it in advance.
“Ei t her wa y it is unforgivable. The ministers and the people at the top of the SQA, Educat ion Scotland, the civil service – these people are paid very well to work hard and do their jobs.
“The y c a n not be unaccountable when they create this carnage in the lives of young people.”
The SQA has admitted it lowered about 125,000 teacher- estimated grades and many students believe they were penalised in the process because their schools have historically not performed as well as others.
More than 35,000 people have signed an online petition to re- evaluate the results, calling the system a “classist marking scheme”.
The Scottish Government has so far insisted any unfair results will be dealt with through the usual appeals process.
But McConnell added: “These young people are already traumatised by lockdown, by not having had their exams, worrying about their results for all these months. They’re now worrying about their future, they’re going into the most uncertain future of a generation in terms of their health, their education and their job prospects.
“So to sit around and say it’s their job to submit an appeal is an abdication of responsibility. The children themselves can’t even submit an appeal, it needs to go through their school.
“There is already going to be huge pressu re on schools because of the way the classrooms reopening has been handled by ministers, so it’s problems piled on top of problems. It’s just not good enough.”
An SQA spokesman insisted the moderation process was fair.
He said: “We believe we have delivered fairness to learners through a consistent, evidencebased approach in the absence of exams.
“We have maintained the integrity and credibility of our qualifications system – ensuring that standards are maintained over time, in the interests of learners – through judicious moderation of grades.
“The most disadvantaged young people have achieved better results in 2020 compared to both 2019 and the average results for the last four years.
“At Grades A to C, the attainment gap between the most and least disadvantaged young people is also narrower this year for National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher than for last year or the average gap for the last four years.”