Chamber and committees

Most local authorities that used historical data as part of the process used data from in the region of 2015 to 2019; they excluded data from 2020. What did your local authorities and RICs do? Did you include the 2020 data in the historical average?

I accept that that is anecdotal feedback from your members, but were the areas where there was pressure to downgrade disproportionately schools and areas that historically had lower performance that is typically linked with lower socioeconomic status and deprivation?

My final question is for Larry Flanagan, given that his union represents college lecturers.

The experience of college students and lecturers is a significantly underexplored aspect of the past two years, but I have had a college student get in touch with me recently to point out what they felt was the inequality of a system in which they were, in the end, graded on the same terms as any school pupil even though they had spent the entire year learning remotely. There were at least periods of time when school students were in school in a classroom, but that was not the experience of college students. How would you reflect on the communication that the SQA issued to both college lecturers and college students? What was their experience relative to that of teachers and pupils in schools?

Tara Lillis, were you in a similar position of representing a union that was not on any of the relevant Government groups?

Did you—

That is fine, convener.

My supplementary was on Bob Doris’s line of questions, and the conversation has moved on a touch, so I am happy to bring it into my line of questioning.

In that case, I will be very brief.

I want to go back to the issue of the volume of assessments—it might have been Willie Rennie who raised it—that young people had to sit in the three or four-week sprint in April and May, in particular. Yesterday, I spoke to a young person who had had 30 assessments in a fortnight, and they were taking two highers and two advanced highers, so that was on top of dissertation deadlines and so on. Did you receive any guidance from the SQA as to how those final assessments should be timetabled to avoid that kind of compression? A lot of that was due to the perfectly valid motivation of teachers to let pupils sit the same assessment over again a couple of times to maximise their chance of getting a good grade, but the cumulative impact was quite negative for the mental health of some young people.

I am keen to hear the rationale for that. In the areas where local authorities excluded that data, such as those in my region, I heard much more from teachers and pupils, who came forward with concerns, because the one year in which the gap closed quite considerably was excluded for moderation purposes. Could you explain why you felt that it was appropriate to include 2020 data for moderation?

Larry Flanagan has distinguished a couple of times between the problems that were inherent in the ACM and those that were compounded by the lockdown period and school closures from January to March. When our predecessor committee was scrutinising the SQA last autumn and in the spring of this year, it was very hard to get an understanding of what scenario planning had been done for a period of prolonged school closure during the year. What is your understanding of the scenario planning that was done by the SQA and by the Scottish Government last summer? The answer that we often got was, essentially, just the repeated affirmation that schools were not going to close. Are you aware of any scenario planning being done on the impact of prolonged closure on the certification model?