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

If you’re going to run a proper exam system, a lot depends on trust, whether in relation to the standard of the courses, the level of support available, or, perhaps most importantly, the fairness of the marking. Lose any of this, and you can quickly find yourself facing enormous problems.

In recent years, this issue has been made painfully clear by issues affecting one particular subject: History.

Back in 2024, when the exam results revealed a remarkable collapse in test scores, teachers condemned the SQA for ‘moving the goalposts’ after the exam had taken place, a move that they said hugely disadvantaged thousands of students. To be clear, those accusations were typically coming from people who had actually marked the exams, so it seems fair to assume that they knew what they were talking about.

In some cases, students lost out on college and university places, and others were expected to resit courses that their teachers knew they should have passed.

The response from the exam board was pretty much what everyone who had ever interacted with the SQA would have been expecting: they started by insisting that there were no problems, and then investigated themselves, before trying to blame everyone else for anything that might have gone wrong.

The matter was raised in parliament, and even sparked accusations that MSPs had been misled. To this day, none of this has ever really been resolved.

And this year, it happened again: history teachers said the now rebranded........

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