Seòmar agus comataidhean

The reason I ask is that I am trying to identify what changed between 2020 and 2021—was it the heavy moderation process or the reintroduction of that? I note that ADES was in discussion with the SQA as early as October 2020 regarding statistical analysis, quality assurance and moderation. There is a feeling that the normal SQA processes, rather than taking place at the SQA end, were front loaded in that process. Is that a fair assessment?

I am a bit confused about the difference between 2020 and 2021. My understanding is that, in 2020, the grades of state school pupils improved faster than those of pupils at private schools, and then, in 2021, the opposite seems to have happened and we seem to have seen a reverse of the progress in narrowing the gap that we saw the year before. Do you have an explanation for that? It is fine to talk about A grades, but, for a lot of young people who are looking to get qualifications and leave school with something meaningful, it just seems a bit odd. I am trying to understand what changed between 2020 and 2021.

Would you share that information with us, as an example?

I agree with your earlier comment that trust and transparency are important. I am not asking you to comment on this, but I personally feel that there was a lack of transparency in the run-up to this year’s grades being awarded, both from the pupils’ point of view and from the public point of view. The cabinet secretary said something quite different in Parliament to what was said on the news on 8 June: the assessment process was being carried out by teachers and they would submit the grades—no one was coming in to overrule them, to second guess them or to look at any other material; the teachers would decide the grades. People then heard about what the normal moderation process is. I am not trying to suggest that that is not what would have happened in a normal year, but I think there was a suggestion that the ACM was somehow different from what happened at the SQA—although, in reality, it was very similar to what would normally happen.

I ask the same question of Seamus Searson and Tara Lillis. Did the SQA have too strong a voice in developing the ACM, given the clear feelings in 2020? Was it trying to retain influence over the process?

I want to return to the earlier line of questioning. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education conducted a review of what local authorities were doing in terms of the ACM, and it found that most local authorities had developed bespoke data analysis tools to support school-level quality assurance, which were used to check against three and five-year data trends. That information was then used to identify and address any unexpected provisional grades. Is that your understanding of what happened across the country?

I understand the logic of that; I just do not think that that was the message that people were getting at a political level or the explanation that we got of how much work had actually gone in. To me, it seemed perfectly logical that ADES was meeting the SQA in October to discuss quality assurance, but the message that was being delivered here politically was a suggestion that the normal SQA processes were somehow not happening and that classroom teachers would be making the decisions by themselves, although I do not think that that is actually what was happening.

They are worse than the grades in 2020.

So, over the year, we have had more time to get the ACM organised and, in that time, people from the most challenging communities have been disadvantaged. Is that the case, or has the system just adjusted back to what we would normally see?

And no one was going to second guess it? It sounds to me as though the process was trying to arrive at the grades you would have expected.