How should Scottish secondary schools assess what their students know and can do so that they can move on to the next stage in their lives? Already, the coronavirus pandemic - and the cancellation of national exams - has provided the impetus for this question to be debated, with some believing exams are the fairest way to assess pupils and others arguing for teachers to be given more responsibility for final grades.

It’s a discussion that is set to rage on in Scotland, given the government’s commitment to replacing the Scottish Qualifications Authority following the criticism in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) review of Curriculum for Excellence, in which it said there was a “misalignment between CfE’s aspirations and the qualification system”.

Ken Muir, who retired as the chief executive of the General Teaching Council for Scotland earlier this year, is leading that piece of work and, over the next six months, will be looking at the “likely replacement of the SQA with a new curriculum and assessment agency”. He is expected to publish his conclusions around February.

In the meantime, another OECD review - looking in detail at qualifications - was published on 31 August. It was written by assessment expert Gordon Stobart, who quite clearly backs a change in tack - although he questions if Scotland will be able to get past its exam habit, which, he points out, dates back to the Victorian era.

Stobart, who is emeritus professor of education at UCL and honorary research fellow at the Oxford University Centre for Educational Assessment, makes the case for the “desired curricular skills and understanding” to be “actively encouraged and reinforced by the format and demands of the test”. If your curriculum aspires to develop skills such as collaboration, communication and creativity, asks Stobart, can you really assess those with a pen-and-paper exam?

Quite clearly, he thinks not, and suggests that “one solution is to entrust more of the summative assessment to classroom teachers”, which could include teacher continuous assessment, research projects, portfolios and direct assessment of skills.

He acknowledges that, in Scotland, “most qualifications involve an element of coursework”, but he also says the focus is on “curriculum-based national examinations, which are externally set and marked”.

Stobart looks closely at how much of a student’s final result is determined by coursework and how much is determined by exams at National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher. At Higher, he finds there are no subjects that are without exams; in 14 subjects, the exam determines less than 50 per cent of the final result; in 18 subjects, it determines 51 to 75 per cent of the result; and in nine subjects, the exam determines 76 per cent or more of the result.

Stobart contrasts this with the way students leaving school are assessed in Queensland, Australia, where 75 per cent of the results are determined by coursework that is marked and moderated by teachers; or in the Canadian province of Ontario, where teachers’ continuous assessments contribute to 70 per cent of the result.

Not just a cultural barrier

In Scotland, however, there is more than just a cultural barrier to putting more responsibility for the final grades achieved by pupils in the hands of teachers.

The SQA, in its submission to Stobart’s review, mounted a robust defence of the qualifications that were introduced to chime with CfE. That introduction started in 2012, with the first National 5 exams sat in 2014.

The SQA’s view is that these qualifications “were fully aligned with the aspirations of CfE” and “met the original purposes and aims of the curriculum”, but this was “somewhat weakened by subsequent issues and decisions”.

One aspect of the new qualifications, which was scrapped shortly after being introduced, was unit assessments.

As Stobart explains, the qualifications were modular - with teachers required to run and mark assessments as pupils worked their way through the courses - but this led to complaints from teachers and parents. Parents said their children were being over-assessed and required to sit too many tests; teachers complained that the “testing treadmill” in schools was making their workload intolerable.

So, in 2016, shortly after becoming education secretary, John Swinney committed to removing unit assessments, in a move initially welcomed enthusiastically by teaching unions.

But Swinney’s decision had unintended consequences. Rather ominously, even now in 2021 - nearly five years after that decision was announced - the SQA says the full extent of the impact is “unlikely to be known for some time”. What we do know is that some consequences were immediate: the final exams at National 5 and Higher got longer in most subjects, and exams were introduced for practical subjects, such as photography and dance, where previously there hadn’t been any.

Stobart says the removal of the unit assessments led to “a retrenchment towards a more traditional examination system, with teacher assessment of individual units abandoned” and the role of final exams “expanded”.

There were arguments made at the time that the SQA went further than it had to with the changes. What is certainly clear now is that any system of increased teacher input in grading is not just about trusting teachers, it is also about ensuring they have the time to take on that additional responsibility.

Currently, Scottish teachers spend more time in front of classes than those in almost any other comparable country. The Scottish government has committed to reducing class contact time by 2.5 hours a week, but will that be enough?

College lecturer and writer James McEnaney wrote an online article for Tes Scotland this month in which he made the case for “radically reducing the contact time of teachers” just so they could do “the basics of the job” as it is at present, giving them time to plan high-quality lessons, review students’ work and provide feedback, and take part in professional development.

Breaking away

Clearly, however, it is not impossible for teachers to also have more of a role in shaping assessment. Stobart points to New Zealand and Queensland, Australia, as examples of countries that “have broken away from the British model of single-subject examinations and of extensive external examinations”.

He argues that not only would a wider range of assessment approaches chime better with the curriculum, it would also make the system more resilient “in the face of massive disruption, such as that seen in the Covid-19 pandemic”.

Stobart says: “Those jurisdictions that relied solely on examination results experienced crises as procedures had to be hastily developed to determine grades.

“By comparison, those systems that draw on multiple forms of evidence were indeed able to adapt more flexibly.”

In Scotland, the pandemic saw schools “become the fallback”, he says, and they “proved they could cope”.

But there is a sense that the only reason Scottish teachers have survived the experience of the past two years is because they viewed it as a temporary response to an emergency situation. Indeed, Stobart also notes that the system that replaced national exams in 2020-21 “led to considerable workload issues in schools for both teachers and students”.

So any new assessment system is likely to flourish or flounder depending on whether or not teachers have the time to deliver it.

As Stobart says, what comes next will be about finding the “optimal trade-off between construct validity, reliability and manageability”. And the recent past has shown that we ignore manageability at our peril.

Emma Seith is a reporter for Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith

This article originally appeared in the 17 September 2021 issue under the headline “How do we solve the qualifications conundrum?”