Lindsay Paterson:

After shameful week that saw pupils’ chances blighted by skewed results:

THE return of schools this week will be like nothing ever seen before. There is the normal chaos of a new school year. There is coronavirus. And there is last week’s devastating blow over grades. The urgent problem now for everyone – students, parents and teachers – is that there is hardly any time left to sort things out.

The start of the school year is pretty chaotic at the best of times. There is a new timetable. Students have to get used to teachers they have never had before, and vice versa. First years are having to get used to a strange environment.

To cap it all, sometimes there has been building work over the summer, or the equipment in a lab has been replaced, or the Wi-Fi network is broken. None of this is easy, but it always calms down after a couple of weeks.

This year the schools have been shut for five months. So the strangeness of the usual August return is multiplied five times.

Many children will have forgotten what school is like. Teachers will have to remember where everything is – their books, equipYour ment, records of students’ work. The classrooms and corridors, break times and school transport will have been reorganised to keep everyone safely apart. No one knows how long this will take to settle, but let’s give it a month.

And then, heaped on top of all this, is the unique contribution by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) to young people’s well-being in this stressful year – the utter shambles of the process of awarding grades. This one has to be dealt with by next Friday.

Students, former students and their parents and teachers all face this coming week with a mixture of anxiety, despair and anger.

We all know what happened. It is as though innocent people had been convicted of a crime in order to force crime figures in their postcode to look like these patterns in recent years. But what matters now is what comes next.

If we listen to the official line from the SQA, there is only one lifeline left: appeals. This will deal with any ‘genuine individual injustices’, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has promised. The SQA has insisted that the appeals process is crucial to getting a fair grade.

The deadlines are tight. Your school can submit an appeal if your awarded grade last week was less than what teachers predicted.

If you urgently need the result to get into a university or a college, your school needs to tell the SQA that you want to appeal by next Friday. That has to be done separately for each of your subjects. school has to send evidence to back up your appeal. The SQA promises a decision on these urgent appeals by September 4.

So should parents and students be reassured? Well, maybe.

Before we get to that, let’s just think of the scale of the challenge.

There are nearly 125,000 cases eligible for appeal. A good estimate is that about half of these fall into the urgent category – around 60,000. How much time would you give an appeal to make it fair? Several hours might seem decent. After all, we are talking about a young person’s entire future.

But we know things are a bit pressured this year, and so let’s be reasonable and compromise on an hour. Not great, but with a bit of speed-reading and lots of goodwill, that could be enough. So 60,000 hours to judge the urgent appeals.

All these urgent appeals have to be handled in only two weeks.

Normally, marking is done by teachers in their spare time, in May and June. Perhaps they can do so now, but teachers have more than enough on their plates with the effects of Covid-19 heaped on top of the usual disruption of starting the new school year.

Are they really going to be able to add hours and hours adjudicating appeals on top of all this? Even at eight hours of overtime per week, the SQA would need about 4,000 teachers to do it in time.

These cannot just be summoned up by magic. Yet the SQA does not appear to have done anything like the scale of recruitment that might be needed.

And that is before we even get to the non-urgent appeals, which cannot wait for more than a few weeks into September.

Only one thing can give. The assessment of appeals will be rushed and skimped.

That makes everything even more unreliable and stressful than the entire process so far.

What other options do students and their parents have?

You can get in touch with universities and colleges directly. They have said they will be flexible and lenient this year.

So do not take at face value any automatic emails or texts you might have received immediately after the results were announced. These will have been generated automatically by yet another computer.

Instead, contact the department where you would like to study and ask them to look at the same evidence as the school is using for your appeal. It is best if that evidence comes from a test done under exam conditions, for example, the prelims.

Get a letter from your school verifying your grade in the prelim and tell your preferred university or college department that you can send this to them.

Do not give up on this. Keep pestering them. It is your future that is at stake. In any case, the universities and colleges need your custom.

It is a pity that individual families will have to do this on their own. Much better would be if the universities and colleges were to make a public promise to look at alternative evidence of this kind. Sad to say, they have been silent so far.

Then the last piece of advice is to try to get answers.

The hapless chief executive of the SQA, Fiona Robertson, has been summoned to appear before the Scottish parliament’s education committee on Wednesday.

The members of the committee are listed on the parliament’s website. Inundate them with your stories. Get them to ask two crucial questions of her and of the Scottish Government: How will the SQA manage the appeals, and how are universities and colleges going to deal with alternative evidence?

If enough people do that, maybe there might be some small chance of progress. But what a mess.

The SQA’s contribution to pupil well-being has been an utter shambles But what other options do our students have? Pester colleges ... and MSPs