Hard times shine a light on leaders and hopes for future

Iwell remember getting my final school exam results. It was in the ERP – Era of the Rotary Phone – before the internet or social media, when the microchip was but a twinkle in a billionaire’s eye.

It was a very public spectacle that took place around midnight in summer, a ritual you would attend even before it was your turn. Results were posted outside the local newspaper offices at the witching hour, school by school, names in alphabetical order, your performance on display before a not entirely sober crowd. Some would burst into tears, others howl in triumph, and there was a fair smattering of relief among those of us who were regularly named as wild, ungovernable and insufficiently in awe of respectable career options.

That matric certificate opened doors. First to a university degree, and then to a career that has taken me around the world.

Of course no child in history has ever really eaten their Brussels sprouts out of sympathy for the starving children in Africa, but when I was at school more than 80% of South Africans were, by law, receiving deliberately inferior education in rudimentary facilities, in a system cruelly – and I mean cruelly – designed to enforce significant inequality based on race. Initiatives like Each One Teach One were born in shanty towns and basic literacy skills were learnt in hovels by lamplight. This remains my benchmark for what a woefully deprived society can achieve against the odds.

Now, in 2020, Scotland’s reality has gone science-fiction after a microbe 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt paralysed the world, and school exams were cancelled.

There was always going to be shouting and pointing at the way Scottish Qualifications Authority moderators adjusted results accordingly. It can’t have been an easy algorithm to get right, and was based on teachers’ estimates drawn from prelims and work through the year, and then set against the schools’ past performance. It’s thrown up some horror stories and hot-button statistics, not least that 93% of the 133,000 adjusted marks were graded downwards, and there are stories of pupils being failed who had previously achieved As. Worse, some 15.2% of downgrades were in deprived areas compared to 6.9% in more affluent communities.

Now, I can’t work out whether moderators actually looked at any of the individual work they graded or whether they saw the schools’ cohort as a mass of numbers and statistics. But a free appeals process is already in place, with a deadline ensuring students have time to apply for university places. Also, Scotland is the first cab off the rank to release results.

Let’s see how well England, Ireland and Wales do.

Education Secretary John Swinney is expected to make a statement after parliament returns from recess on Tuesday and SQA chief executive Fiona Robertson faces MSPs on Wednesday, appearing before the Education and Skills Committee. Before we shout any louder, we should hear what she says.

While I don’t diminish the real disappointment some Courier Country pupils are feeling at their exam results, I’m still in awe that Scots get free university tuition and astounded at the facilities and standards in schools. Before you laugh, I can tell you that the equipment and facilities at the new(ish) Harris Academy are infinitely superior to that at the university where I taught in Australia – where students pay thousands each year in tuition. Yes, really.

Good things could still come. The Covid-19 pandemic has swept a world already in crisis. It’s a long list – democracy and accountability are under profound threat, the science says climate change is real and we’re running out of time, and the rise of artificial intelligence was already changing the workplace before everything shut down.

In Laurence Gonzales’ book, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, he studied people who had survived accidents and catastrophes where they should have perished. He concluded an essential aspect of survival happens immediately after the event – coming up with a clear and sustainable plan and sticking to it, not giving in to fear and panic, simply focusing on the next essential step.

If a positive comes from the unprecedented situation we suddenly found ourselves in, its that people are thinking carefully about their future, in a big-picture way. It’s thrown leadership into clear light; leaders of major countries and economies have been exposed as dangerously ignorant, arrogant, and inept. Whereas before, as the march of neo-liberalism crushed the social contract, now economies that support society are looking more attractive.

Apathy is turning into activism and ordinary people are remembering why they are extraordinary. Let’s hope it lasts.

Pictures: Shutterstock/Steve Brown/Gareth Jennings. Left: Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why by Laurence Gonzales. Above pictures, clockwise from top left, show Laura Devlin, Dylan Kidd, Dylan Quigley, Jill Dailly with Daisy Young, and Alex Douglas with sister Georgi Douglas opening their SQA exam results.