All smiles on exam results day belies the true tests facing Jenny Gilruth

TV crews stunt up a group of happy kids discovering their results as if they didn’t know already. When did the news bulletins about exam results ever feature a pupil opening their envelope (or hopefully complete email) on camera and bursting into tears because the disappointing C in biology meant no place at medical school?

It’s a day for celebration and every politician asked for their views on the results prefixes their remarks by congratulating “all our hard-working students on their achievements”, with all the sincerity of a Love Island chat-up line.

As they trudge back to classes this week, or set off on the next stage of their lives, the brutal truth is what Scottish pupils have achieved are letters on a page which evidence strongly suggests is a diminishing reflection on their abilities or capacity to learn. The three-yearly Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests show a steady decline in capabilities of Scottish 15-year-olds in reading, maths and science over 20 years, but no-one would seriously argue the students of today are proportionately less clever than their predecessors. 

Similarly, few but SNP diehards claim everything is fine, but there is no agreement about how to address falling standards, and after the weekend revelation that Scottish education secretary Jenny Gilruth has rejected the main recommendation of last year’s review of the qualifications system under Glasgow University’s Professor Louise Hayward to scrap the National 5 exams in favour of a new Diploma of Achievement, it’s fair to ask if there is a plan at all.  It looks very like a softening-up exercise in advance of her official response to the review’s recommendations in the next few weeks, when a new behaviour action programme is also due imminently

Addressing what is actually being taught is another matter and Ms Gilruth, formerly a Modern Studies teacher, told the Sunday Times there would be no “big bang” reform but an evolution, and to a degree she is correct. Turning the system upside down overnight will not provide instant improvements, and if anything, the experience of Curriculum for Excellence is a clear demonstration of the opposite, which might explain her caution. But without a decisive moment to signal real change and a strong sense of direction, the good intention of incremental improvement is more likely to result in drift and stagnation.

Ms Gilruth will need to have very strong arguments to explain why she should shelve the 26 recommendations from a 21-strong independent review group led by an expert in educational assessment which included a wide range of views from teaching unions to the CBI. The Hayward Review set out to address the issue of over-testing in a system based around formal examinations in fourth, fifth and sixth year, and fair assessment of non-academic children. But it was not a critique of what was being taught and didn’t delve into how it came about.

The English system has its critics, but at least it has the advantage of a year between GCSEs and A levels and a system which has been settled for as long as anyone can remember. The stability is in stark contrast to the regular process of reform to which Scottish schools have been subjected over the years, from the replacement of O-Grades with  Standard Grades in 1986 and then to Nat 5s in 2010 and the creation of Advanced Highers when the Certificate of Sixth Year Studies was abandoned in 2000.

The result is a chorus of criticism every August when the results appear. It shouldn’t be forgotten that the Scottish system was based on most pupils leaving school after fifth year and the popularity of Advanced Highers and another year is a relatively new phenomenon.  But just as Scottish universities have failed to alter the basic four-year undergraduate degree programme, the school system has not taken this into account.

A Levels are criticised for narrowing pupil choices, and Scottish schools have held onto the Highers system to retain the traditional breadth of a Scottish education. But over time the pupils have made their own decision to specialise early anyway, so we have ended up with a three-tier system almost by accident. It’s one in which the standard of the current Highers is on a par with the old O-Grades, and topics once covered in Highers now left to the Advanced course. So perhaps the answer is not scrapping Nat 5s in isolation, but bringing Highers forward a year to create a gap in 5th year, otherwise known south of the border as lower sixth.

The chances of such an approach being taken are slim to non-existent because what drives Scottish schools is not improving capabilities for all but tackling the attainment gap, and it’s a lot easier to close the gap by lowering the bar. It’s also very, very hard to tackle the poverty-related attainment through education reform when the root causes are nothing to do with school, and less to do with financial poverty than parental encouragement. But standards can’t improve without raising the bar somewhere in the system, because whether it’s a certificate of achievement or a set of exam passes, the legal point of departure from compulsory education drives the whole system from the first day in Primary One.

Anything other than cosmetic change is a vast undertaking, but the facts from PISA and last week’s results show standards are falling while the attainment gap is widening. For all the annual back-slapping and jumping for joy it’s hard to put that down as anything other than abject failure, but when Ms Gilruth gives her opinion on the Hayward Review, don’t be surprised if everyone gets full marks. Except, of course, Westminster.