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Good morning, and thanks for joining us.

I will return to a question that I asked the commissioner earlier, on the unintended consequences of some of the changes around current widening access targets, specifically in relation to admissions behaviours. From your experience of your institutions, how has that changed and what has your learning been in relation to the success or failure of students carrying on to complete their course?

I will bring in Lydia Rohmer to respond from a college perspective.

Good morning, Professor McKendrick, and thanks for joining us today.

I want to carry on the line of questioning that George Adam and Keith Brown have pursued, because I am interested in hearing, from your experience and from what you have had the chance to look at, what unintended consequences and admissions behaviours the targets have delivered.

You outlined well how, in some cases, we have set universities up to fail because they have not been able to achieve the targets. However, are we creating a situation in which, because we have the targets, we are also setting young people up to fail? We can tick a box to say that we got them into university for year 1, but we are not sustaining them all to graduation.

I have seen some of the great work that is going on with care-experienced young people in Edinburgh. That is a great model, but we are talking about a different model for the wider student population. What is your view on that—specifically, on the point that the approach has driven admissions behaviours to change, but not necessarily to deliver the outcomes for which we hope?

We heard that teachers talked to one another and did not understand why pupils had underperformed. The cabinet secretary said that overpresentation was a key theme in the report and that students were potentially sitting exams at a level that they were not ready for, which impacted on performance. Is it your understanding that there is overpresentation that sets young people up to fail?

Thank you for that.

I return to Pam Duncan-Glancy’s question. Has there been a failure in exam timetabling this year?

I asked that question because I met a constituent on Monday whose daughter is sitting psychology, and there was initially an exam clash with English. To be honest, I do not understand why any other exam was scheduled to be on the same day as higher English, given that no fewer than 34,000 pupils have sat it in any of the past five years. The SQA has now said that, in the interest of wellbeing, the psychology exam will be moved forward by two weeks. You used the analogy of someone who is planning to sit their driving test. It is concerning for young people who are planning when they will sit their exams to be told that they will now sit one of them two weeks earlier than they expected. That increases the pressure on them.

I know that timetabling is not a perfect science, but I do not understand why the contingency date of 2 June was not used for the psychology exam, given the lower numbers of candidates that were presenting. That is why I asked the question. Although you have said that you listened to other partners, it seems that parents and young people have not been part of that conversation. What seems to be a very straightforward solution, which I have just put to you, has not been taken forward and that is now putting more pressure on young people and teachers.

Would it not therefore have been more sensible to move psychology to that date rather than forward? The rationale that SQA has outlined relates to pupil wellbeing, but moving an exam forward is seen by parents and pupils not as being for their wellbeing but stressful. I did not understand the timetabling. Given the significant changes that have been put in place, it feels like the timetabling for this set of exams has been more problematic than in previous years.

I have a couple of questions about literacy standards. It has been suggested that one key reason for the fall in performance in higher history is candidates’ literacy standards. However, we have not seen similar falls in marks in other literacy-based subjects. What work has the SQA undertaken to analyse whether candidates who took higher history also performed worse in other subjects? What plans are being put in place to publish that?

Do you have the same model?

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today.

I will carry on some of the conversation that Neil Cowie started in relation to post-16 learning and the pre-16 opportunity. How can schools and colleges further develop their relationships in order to improve effectiveness and those partnerships? I recently visited Barnardo’s Works here in the capital, which I know has been working with Edinburgh College, especially around 14 and 15-year-old pupils who are not going to school and are disengaged from the school system, like the pupils Neil Cowie mentioned. How can those relationships be improved in terms of both pre-16 and post-16 education?

I will bring in Audrey Cumberford, as I mentioned Edinburgh College.

What struck me when I met some of the young people involved in the school-college partnership was the fact that they still hated going to school and were ready for college. Given your expertise, what is your view on that? One of them told me that they would go to school only because they were forced to, and that they were still completely disconnected from the school setting. They felt as though they were being told, “Until you’re 16, we can’t do anything with you, except that you can go to college and do some of the things that you want to do now.” What reforms should be made in that regard?