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I want to pick up on what Mr Sousa said about public opinion and challenge the idea that there is wide public opposition to increasing tax. I am looking at two polls from roughly this time last year. The Scottish poll is from last December, and it showed that a majority of people—by a margin of more than two to one—are supportive of rather than opposed to the Scottish Government’s increase in the higher rate of income tax. There was a UK-wide poll just before the Liz Truss mini-budget that showed that a majority of people are in favour of increasing taxes to increase spending on, among other things, social security, which is interesting, given the attempts to demonise that. The most recent British election study shows that the vast majority of the UK electorate have left-of-centre economic values, even if they would not use a label like that, including a majority of Conservative voters.

I recognise that there is a difference between public opinion and the actual effect of public policy changes. If every general practitioner in the country was in the minority of people opposed to tax rises and half of them moved to Australia as a result of tax rises, that would clearly have an impact. Is there an issue that, when we are talking about the public discussion of taxation, as John Mason touched on, the public discourse as defined by politicians and experts is quite far removed from the majority of public opinion on core economic values?

Thank you.

How do those numbers—the three and seven out of 10—compare with what would usually be the case with a script remarking service?

Presumably, you get far fewer appeals with script remarking than you did last year with a different system.

Sorry to cut in—I am conscious of time. That is the core issue, because it comes back to the debate that we have had over the past couple of years and discussions that I have had with you on those exceptional circumstances: the young people who had a family bereavement immediately before their exam or a panic attack during their exam or whatever. I have brought some of those cases to you as casework, and we have had wider policy discussions about them. How do we make sure that the young people in those exceptional circumstances, of which there are a wide variety, get a fair opportunity?

I would like to ask a few questions about the appeals system. Over the past few years, it has changed quite a bit for a variety of reasons—most obviously, but not entirely, because of the pandemic. The 2022 appeals system probably received the most positive welcome from young people and from organisations that represent them and their rights. We had an appeals system that allowed direct access for young people, that was free and that considered evidence in the round. It was not just a script remarking service.

Perhaps this is a subjective term, but we have gone back from that. We have moved away from that for this year and the system has gone back to script remarking again. Can you explain the rationale behind that decision? Specifically, what were the issues with last year’s appeals service, which was based on wider evidence of young people’s work throughout the year?

Yes. Sorry.

That covers some young people but not all of them. For example—I have dealt with casework like this—there is the young person whose parent died the day before the exam but who really felt that they wanted to go in and take the exam. They are having to make a choice: “Do I think that I can perform well enough in the exam, or do I make a choice before that to take up the exceptional circumstances service?”

Did the young people on the learner panel support the change? Did organisations that represent young people’s rights support the change to the script remarking service this year? Did the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland support that?

Is not it the case that, ultimately, the issue is that grading is relative and that, owing to how the system operates, there can be only so many As, Bs and Cs each year? For example, if the number of A grades in the first instance looks to have increased significantly, that is interpreted as there being a question about the integrity of the data. Ultimately, the approach to grade boundaries sets a cap on the number of A grades that there can be each year.

I will just come in on that point. I completely understand the concern about overassessment, particularly in relation to the challenges in 2021 with managing the lack of exams. However, in the period between 2014 and the pandemic, the script remarking service that we moved towards rather than the usual assessment system was, partly because of cost, disproportionately used by independent schools. I get the concerns about fairness, but the script remarking system that we used and to which we have now returned has its own issues with fairness—they are evidenced—as well.