Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 03 June 2021
Thank you, Presiding Officer.
“The evidence the committee has received from teachers should give the SQA serious cause for concern.”
That was the first conclusion of a report that was unanimously agreed by the Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee in January 2017. I sat on that committee throughout the inquiry and have done so in the years since. I do not think that any of us could say with honesty that the performance of the SQA has improved in that time. It is quite clear that the opposite has been the case.
The specific concern that was raised in that instance was about the apparent breakdown in trust between teachers and the SQA. The committee recommended that the SQA
“review its approach to engaging with teachers to enable candid communication from those with criticisms”,
and it said that the SQA needs to be able to demonstrate how those views are taken into account,
“in order to improve trust.”
It is obvious to all of us that trust in the SQA has plummeted in recent years instead of improving. I do not believe that that trust has ever been as low as it is now, not just among teachers but among pupils and the public as a whole. That was not the only cause for concern in the 2017 report—I will come back to some of the other concerns later.
Underperformance by the exams authority certainly has not been limited to the period of the pandemic, as Daniel Johnson said—I will address the unique nature of recent challenges in a moment—as the SQA’s failings have been a constant feature of the Parliament’s scrutiny work for years, since long before the 2017 report. Too often, the organisation has appeared to be more concerned with protecting its reputation and what it sees as the credibility of the system than with honestly explaining what is going on or with giving every individual learner a fair opportunity to succeed.