This article appears as part of the Lessons to Learn newsletter.

So it’s that time of year again.

A few days from now, students up and down the country – most of them teenagers, but with a few adults in the mix as well – will be waiting to discover the grades they have been awarded for National 5, Higher, and Advanced Higher courses.

The letters that appear in their text messages, emails, and formal certificates may well have a huge impact on the trajectory of their lives.

It is a huge day for students and their families, but also their teachers.

And it is, unsurprisingly, a major event in the country’s political calendar.

Like it or not, exam results day often has political consequences. This is inevitable given the stakes, and in recent years has also been driven by some utterly appalling decision-making from the people who are paid massive salaries to oversee the system itself.

The most obvious example of that was in 2020, when the government and the exam board used a moderation model that downgraded thousands of pupils, disproportionately affecting those in the poorest communities in Scotland, and then said that they were acting in defence of fairness.

A day with the communities fighting to save their school

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But anyone with even a........

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