We are, I think it’s fair to say, long past the point of pretending that the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) is being replaced. Were all grown-ups here, and we should act like it, so let’s just call things by their true name and accept that what is being offered is, at best, a rebrand.

But how did we get here, and why does it matter?

Back in 2021, the SNP-led Scottish Government announced that the SQA was to be scrapped and replaced with a new body. The absolutely core issue here was that the SQA had completely failed, had lost the confidence of pretty much everyone with any sort of stake in the education system, and simply had to go.

None of that came as any sort of surprise to teachers. When I joined the profession in 2010 I quickly heard a great deal about the dysfunction of the SQA, it’s inflated (and damaging) sense of self-importance, the contempt with which it treated teachers, and more that isn’t printable. It was all true, and over the next decade things somehow got even worse.

And then the pandemic happened, exams were cancelled in 2020, and the SQA – with the full support of the Scottish Government – used an algorithm to intentionally suppress the grades of students from the poorest parts of the country. This attack on working class Scotland was defeated not by politicians (as the Greens recently claimed) but by the actions of teenagers who took to the streets in protest.

Amazingly, nobody faced any consequences for their failures; unsurprisingly, therefore, the approach imposed in 2021 was also a disaster, with pupils and their teachers facing a brutal system of ‘exams by stealth’.

And so, in June of that year, then education secretary Shirley Anne-Somerville successfully distracted most people from the detail of an international report into........

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