Hansard

I congratulate Davy Russell on making his first speech in the chamber. I find that, nine years in, the novelty and privilege of being in the chamber have certainly not worn off yet.

I start by re-emphasising the point about the robust governance mechanisms that we have put in place around accreditation for qualifications Scotland. Whereas the SQA has, until very recently, had just a chief executive, qualifications Scotland will at all times have a chief executive, a chief examiner and a chief accreditation officer. The chief examiner will be accountable to the expert group on standards, and the chief accreditation officer will be accountable to the accreditation committee. We have just agreed to separate their roles in law and to require them to act independently of each other. That addresses form, but we need to be honest that the Parliament was not yet ready to make a decision on function in terms of the scope of accreditation. However, we have agreed a clear process for that going forward, and I think that we have struck the right balance.

The claim that what we have agreed to today does not meet the demands that have been set out by teachers and young people in particular rings a bit hollow. Teachers and young people have not been talking to us about the specifics of where the accreditation function sits; the most common piece of feedback that we received from those who are directly involved in the system was a desire for a change of personnel at the top of the organisation, and that is what we already have, with a new chair, a new chief executive and a new leadership culture that is being developed as a result.

I want to talk about the next steps. Now that we have addressed the questions of structure, we need to move on to how to reform our qualifications and inspection systems. Scotland’s exam system is still stuck in the Victorian era. We still have a high-stakes, end-of-term exam model that is largely unchanged from when it was set up about 150 years ago. There are problems with that for a whole range of reasons. It is abysmal for young people with additional support needs in particular. It is not appropriate that, when it comes to exams, the one-stop solution for young people with additional needs is to simply get more time in the exam hall. For the young people who struggle most with that format, having to sit in the exam hall for even longer than everybody else is not a solution and often makes things worse.

We now have alternative data sets. Once we resolved the issues in 2020, we had a comparison between what happens when teachers use their professional judgment to issue grades for their young people and what happens through the exam system. That poses a question for us: were teachers really overrewarding working-class young people in particular, or do we have an exam system that penalises those young people compared with their colleagues from more middle-class backgrounds?

We have an opportunity to balance the system with more continuous assessment, which is a much more accurate reflection of young people’s knowledge and abilities. The proposals that Professor Hayward set out provide an opportunity to do that. They are bold, but they are exactly what we need. We have a 21st century curriculum in Scotland, and it deserves a 21st century qualifications system to match up with it. That is how we can meet the expectations that the OECD review, in particular, has put on us.

I ask the chief inspector to be bold, too. It would be honest to say that our current inspection system is not driving improvement. Inspectors often have a similar experience of life to that of the King, because everywhere that they go smells of wet paint. I propose that we move to a system of peer review. That could be done in different ways—we could have teachers who take a week or two out of school each year to take part in a peer review exercise with teachers from another school and another authority area, and we could have three or four-year secondments as career progression opportunities. That would mean that those who conducted inspections always had direct, recent experience of being in a classroom.

I finish by congratulating, in particular, the young people who got us to this point—those in the Scottish Youth Parliament and those elsewhere who demanded change and forced us to deliver it. The bill provides major change. It delivers what young people and teachers have demanded. Tonight’s vote will be one of the most significant ones in this parliamentary session. The SQA’s abolition will get the headlines, but what is much more important is the far stronger organisation that we are putting in its place—one that will put the voices of young people and teachers at its heart from the start.