Concerns around this year’s qualifications are many and increasingly complex. The General Secretary recently outlined some of the challenges in his recent evidence session to the Scottish Parliament’s education committee and as a member of the NQ2021 Group continues to be directly involved in seeking workable solutions.

It took a bit of time, but we eventually got a Government decision on the cancellation of the Higher and Advanced Higher diet meaning that across all qualifications, we had an alternative assessment model for accreditation of awards, based on the exercise of professional judgement by teachers. Notwithstanding concerns around workload, the EIS supports the principles underpinning that model, which we believe may offer a fairer system than the high-stakes tests that have been the mainstay of Scottish education as well as being a pragmatic solution to the current circumstances.

The model offers a degree of confidence about the outcomes because assessment does not involve an SQA algorithm or a factoring-in of past school performance, but evidence produced by this cohort of senior pupils, assessed by their teachers, and moderated by a quality assurance programme.

Clearly the current remote learning scenario creates challenges around the production of evidence, which may become critical at some point, but for the moment the advice is that the focus should absolutely be on learning rather than summative assessment so that young people are able to make progress.

There will come a point at which, if senior phase students are not back in school, some very practical difficulties will start to emerge around how to produce the evidence on which professional judgement is made. We need to be clear, however, that we cannot assess that which hasn’t been taught. Teachers are not being asked to speculate as to the potential of an individual, but to make a judgement on the evidence produced by the assessment process.

The key message therefore is that in remote learning, the focus is not on assessment or on producing evidence; it is on continuing the learning for young people so that they are in a better position to demonstrate what they have learned through evidence later in the year, when, it is to be hoped, that might be more possible than it is now.

The pushing back of the submission date for estimates until mid-June is a welcome admission that schools will need more time to deliver both the teaching and the assessments needed to allow accreditation. That said, we need to avoid students simply being driven through a series of mini-exams when they return otherwise we simply replicate the high-stakes exam scenario that we had hoped to avoid.

A key issue which the Institute has pushed is excessive workload. This was particularly focussed on the SQA “quality assurance” process, which may need to be modified as a result of lockdown, but remains a driver of additional workload. An agreement in principle for a payment to staff was reached before Christmas but appears to be in a state of limbo currently. The EIS believes that such a payment remains justified based simply on the additional work involved in delivering the alternative assessment model, and similarly the addition to the number of inset days.

A number of scenarios have to be worked through, therefore, and whilst there will be a lot of questions in everyone’s minds, immediate answers are not available because we do not know how long this period of remote learning is going to last.

For example, it may be that, in any phased reopening of schools, senior phase pupils—in particular, fifth year pupils—could be prioritised, because some of their assessments will be critical to their progression but will there also be a need for physical distancing amongst older pupils, if not all pupils, because of the nature of the new variant which would bring further challenge.

Beyond that there may be broader discussions required. For example, a lot of senior phase pupils are looking at qualifications for entry to university. Might this mean the need to delay the start of Higher Education first year courses — university entrance — to allow for remediation processes such as pre-entry bridging courses?

What does the EIS want to hear from the SQA?

We already have a commitment that there will be no algorithms and that, although the SQA is the final arbiter, any dialogue that is required on standards should predate the final submission. Last year, we said that the SQA should, if it found that a school’s figures seemed to be out of line, have professional dialogue with the school, but the SQA could not do that because of time demands. We think that all that professional dialogue has to happen before SQA accreditation takes place.

Ultimately, in an evidence-based awards system, if people disagree with the outcome, it is for the SQA to deal with the appeals process, to look at the evidence and to make judgements. The key EIS “ask” of the SQA, is that it trusts the professionalism of teachers and works on that as the foundation of the assessment system, instead of trying to caveat the process in terms of its own procedures, which can be seen as overly bureaucratic and burdensome by practitioners in the classroom