This week the Scottish Conservative Party has been pushing the Scottish Government to provide an assurance to teachers, parents and pupils that National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher Examinations will go ahead this year. At the time of writing, the Scottish Nationalist Party have given no such guarantee, throwing the future for many young people into uncertainty. The Scottish Government appears to be so committed to leaving pupils, parents and teachers in the dark that they derailed the Scottish Conservative Party’s vote in the Scottish Parliament to assure individuals that exams are going ahead. But it remains the Conservative Party’s clear position that to ensure fairness for school pupils, exams must go ahead.
As with previous years, if exams are cancelled, pupils’ grades will be judged based on teacher assessment and grade predictions, yet this significantly puts pupils from minority ethnic backgrounds at a significant disadvantage as was suggested by the director of the centre for research in race and education in Birmingham University, Professor Kalwant Bhopal:
“There’s a lot of evidence to show that there are stereotypes around particular types of students, so their predicted grades are lower, and when they do the exam, they do better than their predicted grade. Students who are from white, middle-class, affluent backgrounds will do very well from these predicted grades, especially those from private schools.”
This particular comment was made in 2020, at the very start of school closures, however statistics from December 2021 show that the Professor Bhopal was correct as we saw a significant widening of the attainment gap between the richest and poorest students and, unfortunately, those poorest students are disproportionately those pupils who come from a Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic background.
Therefore, there is a clear reasoning behind the Scottish Conservative Party pushing the Scottish Government to give assurances that these discriminatory measures will not be put in place for a 3rd year in a row. In Parliament, Pam Gosal, Scottish Conservative MSP for West Scotland and Shadow Minister for Further and Higher Education, confronted the Scottish Government in saying:
“[The lack of assurances provided by the Scottish Government] shows a complete disregard for pupils’ mental health and for their futures. The Scottish Government must announce its final decision immediately so that extra revision resources can be made available and the necessary health measures can be put in place. If education—and reducing disruption of it—was truly a priority for Nicola Sturgeon’s Government, it would listen to the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, which has recommended that exams go ahead and said that schools would benefit from extra funding to cover virus-related staff absences.”
Throughout her time as Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon has challenged voters to judge her premiership on improving education standards in Scotland, yet by almost every metric, Scotland’s education standards are slipping. With the refusal to provide assurances to staff and pupils that exams will go ahead, it is becoming even more difficult to trust that education is the Scottish Government’s number one priority. Scotland’s education system used to be one of the best in the world, yet today that is no longer the case, and Scotland’s pupils deserve better.