Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 17 February 2021
I agree with the Deputy First Minister that a huge amount of hard work is being done by a great number of people in the SQA and in Education Scotland, and I have no doubt that much of that work has been useful. However, the two key, central points that are entirely inescapable in the debate have been set out by Ross Greer and Liz Smith. The issues with those institutions are not new and they are not confined to the pandemic; they are long-standing issues that have been revisited by the Parliament on a number of occasions. Frankly, we are reaching the limit of having these debates and no action being taken.
The second key issue is the pattern of outcomes and results that are directly caused by those institutions, which cannot be supported. That issue was well set out by Jamie Greene and Willie Rennie. We cannot ignore the pattern of what has happened with the implementation of curriculum for excellence over the past 10 years, starting with the 20,000 pages of guidance that Willie Rennie pointed to, which led to huge confusion among the teaching profession and undoubtedly hampered its roll-out.
We need to talk plainly, because curriculum for excellence has been bedevilled by those on-going issues, and, although many of them have been resolved, there are still lingering issues. Curriculum for excellence was meant to be a broad change in approach, linking across disciplines, but we have seen a fudging of disciplines and boundaries and a lack of clarity. Too much emphasis has been placed on the requirement for teachers to construct a curriculum for themselves, and there is an overarching tick-box approach rather than the broader change in doctrine that was supposed to be ushered in by curriculum for excellence.
Nor can we ignore the issues that have come up with examinations. We know about the problems with multilevel teaching. We also know about the issues that are associated with the introduction of national 5s and the significant changes that had to be made as a result of them.
The truth is that, when we dig into those issues, the problems with the institutions become very clear indeed. At the beginning of the current parliamentary session, when the Education and Skills Committee looked at many of the issues, neither Education Scotland nor the SQA could point to who had made the decisions about the deliverability of those examinations. That lack of transparency and clarity about who is responsible is a theme that we have seen throughout our examination of the issues.
If we look at the more recent problems with the algorithm, we continue to see a lack of transparency from the SQA. It fundamentally changed the methodology, removing the final link of going back to schools to check results, and it never published the algorithm. That is not an approach that we can tolerate in our education system; we need transparency. We need institutions that have the trust of the education system, of teachers and of parents. Quite simply, those institutions have lost that trust, and we cannot allow that state of affairs to carry on any longer.
We hoped that the OECD report would provide answers, but we will not know what those answers are before the election. The election is supposed to be an opportunity for the electorate to make informed decisions, yet in education—the most important subject area that the Parliament will look at, according to the First Minister—the electorate will not be able to make an informed decision, because the OECD report will not be published despite the fact that it will be sitting on ministers’ desks.
For those reasons, we cannot support the Government’s amendment and we must support the Liberal Democrat motion. We need to reform the education system, the SQA and Education Scotland.
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