My parents had a clear-out last week and discovered an artefact long thought to be lost - my first foray into the world of journalism. The inaugural issue of The Original Oldmachar Mag included an angry article by me, then in S3, opining that too many people “couldn’t care less” about climate change (or the “greenhouse effect”, to use the terminology of 1989).
Some things really haven’t changed much in 30-plus years - whether it’s blasé attitudes to climate change or the peripheral place of activities such as putting a school magazine together.
My most powerfully positive memories of secondary school tend to be from the first few years, before exams loomed: the school magazine, a production of Bugsy Malone, cooking an entire meal for myself for the very first time in home economics. Ultimately, however, you knew that your 13 years at school would be judged by a monolithic certificate; that as an “academic” student, there were certain subjects that weren’t meant for you, no matter how much you enjoyed them (I remember well the pang of regret at signing off my S3 choices without feeling able to pick home economics).
In truth, how much have things changed in the three decades since? Yes, schools extol “wider achievement”, and any hierarchy between supposedly academic and vocational subjects is at least more blurred than it used to be. And these days teachers are acutely aware, certainly in Scotland, that they are there to improve the lives of all pupils; the idea of certain students marking time until leaving as soon as possible after S4 is increasingly a thing of the past - far more stay on to the end of S6 now.
However, the schools system in Scotland still pivots on high-stakes, end-of-year exams where your performance on a given day has a huge bearing on what you do after school. No matter that this form of assessment is at odds with every other stage of formal education - from nursery to PhD - where more rounded, ongoing barometers of progress are used: in the senior phase of secondary education, exams still dominate in much the same way they did 30 years ago.
Perhaps, though, things are finally changing - perhaps the state of educational flux brought about by Covid-19 will lead to the radical overhaul of secondary assessment that many have long desired. We now have many secondary teachers openly questioning, in a national consultation, whether we need exams at all in school. The new exam.scot forum is already formulating all sorts of bold ideas for how assessment could be done in future, having been catalysed into existence by last month’s Scottish Qualifications Authority results debacle.
Some of those proposing a different way are urging a little caution, suggesting that exams and external assessment may still have a crucial role to play; that clear heads, not revolutionary zeal, should drive any change. Even they, however, see fundamental flaws in the current system. Many in Scottish education have stepped over a mental threshold: reform that may have felt desirable but fanciful in the past now seems tantalisingly within reach.
Observers from afar might think that teachers have more pressing concerns just now: getting students to wear face coverings in corridors, solving the Rubik’s Cube-like puzzle of where to seat everyone while adhering to social-distancing rules and sorting out what to do if a pupil saunters into class with a distinct tickle in their throat.
In fact, the opposite is true: times like these, when so much is uncertain, when uncontrollable events have recalibrated priorities, are exactly when fundamental change comes to the forefront of people’s minds. If now is not the time to reform exams, then when will be?
@Henry_Hepburn
This article originally appeared in the 4 September 2020 issue under the headline “If we want an exams revolution in Scotland, it’s now or never”
