Meeting of the Parliament 25 June 2025
The bill was a long time coming. For me, the cabinet secretary and some others, it has been nine years in the making; for other members who have been here since before 2016, such as Willie Rennie, it has been even longer than that. The case for this reform has been made across many years. Given the amount of effort that has gone into the bill for that length of time, I thank the Government’s bill team and the legislation team in the Parliament for the huge amount of work that they have put in to deliver it.
However, the bill did not actually need to happen. There was nothing to prevent the SQA from performing better and there was nothing in the legislation that underpins it that prevented it from doing a better job than it did. The issue is that it simply did not do a better job, and legislative change has been required in a dramatic manner to compel better performance. Indeed, towards the start of the previous session of Parliament—in 2017, I think—the Education and Skills Committee, of which the cabinet secretary and I were members, published a report that proposed significant internal change—primarily cultural change—to the SQA. However, it missed that opportunity. It had the opportunity to change and it did not take it.
In 2020, after the scandal of the alternative certification model, with young people being graded based on their postcode rather than on their abilities, there was no apology from the leadership of the SQA. The Government apologised, but the leadership of the SQA never did. It was more focused on having a credible national data set than on meeting the needs of individual young people and learners and delivering what each of them deserved.
In many ways, it was worse for teachers. The SQA’s approach to teachers over years and, indeed, decades has verged on and in some cases surpassed the definition of hostility. I emphasise that I am talking about the senior management team at the SQA and not the whole organisation. There are about 1,000 staff at the SQA—1,000 brilliant, talented and dedicated individuals—and they will make qualifications Scotland a success.
The bill, which was significantly amended through the legislative process, will create an organisation in which staff will have to work with teachers, students and others. They will have to consult extensively before making key decisions, which is something that the SQA not only did not do but often refused to do. Staff will have to co-design the learner charter and the teacher and practitioner charter and set out the principles that will underpin their work. The two committees that will lead on that work will be made up entirely of learners and of teachers and practitioners, and they will link directly to the organisation’s board. That link is currently missing between the learner panels that the SQA has convened or outsourced and the current organisation’s board.
There is a point of learning from the national qualifications group that was set up during the pandemic, in which young people were included but in an entirely tokenistic and disempowering way. The chief examiner—a role that we have just agreed to create—must be an educator. Again, that has been missing from the system. Too often, key decisions have been made by those who, to be frank, did not understand the impact that they would have in the classroom.
The board will include experts who will have that direct experience. That means having at least five teachers and lecturers on the board rather than the situation that we have seen for the past five years, whereby there is not a single teacher or headteacher, or the situation that we saw at one point when there were three management consultants compared with just one teacher. There will be someone on the board speaking for staff and there will be a duty to recruit young people to the board. We are setting very high expectations of those board members.
At this point, I put on the record my thanks to Shirley Rogers, who has already begun the transformation of the SQA as it stands, leading to the creation of qualifications Scotland. As Miles Briggs said a moment ago, we are trying to legislate for a change in culture, and that is exceptionally difficult. However, under the leadership of Shirley Rogers, the culture at the top of the SQA is already changing and it is preparing to meet the expectations that we have set out for qualifications Scotland. I certainly welcome that.
This is a huge opportunity for us to move forward with an organisation that is driven by the voices of teachers and students in particular, and the Scottish Greens will be proud to support the bill at decision time.
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