Rough deal for high school pupils
Moderation system has widened attainment gap by downgrading students in less affluent areas
Amidst all the disruption and suffering which the coronavirus pandemic has inflicted, it is impossible to feel anything but compassion for the school pupils caught up in its wake.
Those who were due to sit their final high school exams this year saw their secondary education end, by necessity, in chaos. Course work once considered critical went uncompleted, uncertainty hung in the air and then the exams were cancelled.
It was the first time since Queen Victoria was on the throne that Scotland’s national exams did not take place. The marks for this year’s students were instead awarded by their teachers and moderated by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA).
Sadly for thousands of pupils the awful uncertainty that has marked much of this year continues today as they wait to speak to their teachers about challenging disputed exam grades.
A quarter of grades awarded have been revised by the SQA, with the vast majority being marked down.
This is not what anyone would have wanted for our children.
And, despite the extreme circumstances in which this new and unavoidably untested system was introduced, it is hard to avoid the thought that much of this heartache might easily have been avoided.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and her deputy John Swinney have quite rightly pointed out that a failure to moderate results would have provoked an outcry at least as big as the one that we are seeing today.
The marks awarded by teachers would, unmoderated, have seen an increase in passes of around 20 per cent on last year – a simply unbelievable set of results. Moderation was necessary. The moderation system is, however, so flawed that even a primary pupil might have spotted the problem.
The students marks have been moderated by a system which appears to treat each school as a block rather than by any independent assessment of the child’s work. That is patently unfair.
The result is a system which has downgraded more students in less affluent areas, reinforcing Scotland’s gaping educational divide. One leading academic points out in The Scotsman today that the brightest pupils in “average” schools are being penalised by this system.
It must be hoped that the appeal system can deliver what this flawed moderation system could not, fair results.