When this year’s Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) results were announced, the government was - quite rightly - keen to highlight the positive stories behind the data.

There was an understandable focus on overall achievement, pass rates and successful university applications, with education secretary John Swinney insisting that “the whole country should rightly be proud”. Other parties also joined in the congratulations, even if some couldn’t resist qualifying their praise by suggesting that students’ achievements had been despite, rather than as a consequence of, the government’s education policies.

The information published by the SQA painted a largely positive picture of Scottish education, but the data available also raised some serious questions about one particular area: the number of entries for courses at levels 4-6 across the country - in other words, qualifications from National 4 to Higher and their equivalent.

It is certainly the case that the number of Higher entries has significantly increased in recent years, jumping from approximately 181,000 in 2012 to nearly 195,000 in 2017 - a particularly impressive feat, given that pupil numbers in secondary schools dropped by roughly 13,000 over the same period.

It was a truly astonishing increase but, as ever, the headline figures don’t tell the whole story and some details make for less comfortable reading.

Across Scotland, entries for Highers peaked at just below 200,000 in 2015, the year in which both the old and new Highers ran at the same time. Since the phasing out of old Highers, however, the trend has been downward, with entry levels dropping by more than 5,000 in just two years.

At Level 5, the entry-levels picture is even less clear, thanks to the more complex nature of the shift to Nationals. While it is true that the number of entries for National 5 qualifications has increased by nearly 80,000 since their introduction (despite a small decline in 2017), things look different once Intermediate 2 entries have been factored into the 2014 and 2015 data. At this point, rather than an overall increase, we see a decline of nearly 17,500 Level 5 entries over the past four years.

Worryingly, that overall pattern of decline looks even steeper for Level 4 qualifications. The reduction in National 4 entries - from a peak of nearly 131,000 in 2015 to just 116,000 this year - has been widely reported, with much discussion over whether, as seems likely, a perceived lack of value for the new, exam-free qualification could be to blame.

Much like with Level 5, however, things get even worse if we include Intermediate 1 entries in the 2014 and 2015 data - at which point we see a massive drop of more than 25,000 Level 4 entries in a four-year period.

How sharp is the decline?

What’s even more concerning is that this still isn’t the full picture. Frustratingly, this type of data is not available for Standard Grade courses, making it impossible to properly compare entry levels now with those from five or 10 years ago. Given that many students would have been sitting eight Standard Grades as opposed to six National 4s or 5s, as has become common, there is little doubt that the decline in entries has been even sharper than the available information suggests.

The most obvious explanation for the more recent drops in entry levels would, naturally, be a comparable drop in student numbers, but there’s a problem: we don’t seem to have lost enough students to account for the “missing” course entries. Since 2015, the number of pupils in secondary schools has only dropped by 1,000 - and this is the total figure for both the broad general education and the senior phase. Yet total entries for Highers, National 5/Intermediate 2 and National 4/Intermediate 1 have fallen by just under 27,000 over the same period. Clearly something else is going on, but what?

Some have suggested that a reduction in “dual entry” of candidates for both National 4 and 5 might explain some of the pattern. Others have argued that an increased use of alternative courses - such as the SQA’s Personal Development Award - or a greater focus on “employability” projects might be a factor. Broader issues, such as the serious shortage of teachers in Scotland, should also be considered.

Narrowing curriculum

The overriding concern, however, has been that this is simply one aspect of the narrowing of the curriculum under Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), with some subject areas - such as languages - bearing the brunt of the reductions explored above. Although recent work by the University of Stirling’s Mark Priestley and Marina Shapira found that this process does not seem to have harmed overall attainment (raising the prospect of young people leaving school with fewer qualifications but higher grades), there are still serious consequences, for individual young people, schools and society as a whole, of reductions in the range and number of qualifications being pursued by senior secondary students.

The problem is that, as with so much else in Scottish education, the overall picture is desperately unclear. Nobody is sure what is going on with entry rates for qualifications - and that isn’t good enough. It remains difficult to discern whether or not CfE’s introduction has improved Scottish education or damaged it, and the lack of clear, transparent analysis of trends from one system to the other, alongside the reluctance to engage in a serious and impartial review of both the curriculum and its implementation, is exacerbating the problem.

Worst of all, these gaps are a major contributory factor in creating the space for the one thing that we know does significant damage to our education system: ongoing attempts to turn it into a party-political weapon.

James McEnaney is a journalist, FE lecturer and former secondary teacher