Sarah McLauchlan is a pupil at Holyrood in Edinburgh who has started a petition to protest against the SQA results and organised a protest outside the SQA headquarters on Friday. There will be another protest outside the Scottish  at 3pm tomorrow.

THE support has been overwhelming and I have over 35,000 signatures already. Everyone can see it is unfair as the SQA actually created a class divide by basing results on schools’ past exam performance (not this year’s students) and their postcode. 

This means thousands of teenagers who may have excelled in their prelims or had steady grades all year have had their results deflated purely because they live in a more deprived area or their school isn’t as privileged as others. This is incredibly classist and insulting.

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Every child is different, so assuming just because they are from a deprived area they won’t do as well and children from privileged areas will excel is biased and unfair. It is completely unacceptable and wrong, especially when class should not be a basis for results which impact the rest of a child’s life.

This needs to be changed. In one of my prelims I got 96% and they gave me a B just because of where the school is situated. I had friends in school that got As and Bs and were given Cs and failed. It just makes no sense.

They had enough time to check each student individually so students should not have been treated as a collective. They are individuals and they all perform differently. It is as if they were just assuming from your background that you were not going to achieve as well as someone with money.

I wholeheartedly believe they should just re-evaluate everyone’s grades.

Our whole year group was affected. In our Higher psychology class everyone was downgraded to a B or C or failed. Not one person got what they got in their prelim.
I am fortunate enough to have an unconditional offer for St Andrews so I think that shows that even though I am from what you would call a deprived area, it doesn’t mean we can’t achieve as much as others. I am seeing people in my year who are not getting into university this year because they are not getting the grades they were promised, even though they have excelled in their year and did really well in their prelims.

They had no exams to mark this year so there was no excuse not to look into each child individually and if they were that shocked by high estimates they should have investigated it and demanded evidence. 

They are legally allowed to demand work whenever they want so I don’t understand why that wasn’t done. They had months and months to do that and to prepare.

No one has had a chance to prove themselves. You are seeing schools from more affluent areas getting their results inflated but people like me just because of where their school is, or the social class that goes to that school, saw their grades deflated. 

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It is sending a message that if you are from a particular place in society that is where you have to stay.

I think it is appalling they could even justify it and the fact that I got over 35,000 people behind me shows there is an issue and someone needs to step up and admit it.

Another point is they knew they were going to be overwhelmed with appeals. If they were aware of that, why did they stick with a system they knew was going to upset a lot of people and where children who are already disadvantaged are just getting pushed out even more? They knew that was going to be an outcome.

I can’t see any justification behind any of it. I don’t think any one of the people behind this plan could look anyone in the eye that didn’t get into university this year or was denied what they deserved and say “you don’t deserve to go to university and you don’t deserve those grades because you are from a deprived area”. That is essentially what they are saying.

It is disgusting and I don’t understand how they can say that someone who sits in an office is more qualified to say what each individual student should get when their teachers have been with them the whole year. 

They barely even looked into the teachers’ input because they just assumed it would be overestimated.

Using a system based on results from students that started before you in previous years is treating people from a certain area as a collective – this is what you should get because this is what everyone else got, so no-one is given the chance to do better than anyone else.

I wholeheartedly believe they should just re-evaluate everyone’s grades.
How is it fair that people from private schools who got Cs or even Ds in their prelims are given As and then people from areas of deprivation are given fails? 
It needs to be fixed. People need to be given what they worked for and what they deserve.

The whole system needs to be looked at and something needs to be changed because it does not support disadvantaged students and class should never be a factor in deciding a child’s future. 

You should not have to look at where someone comes from to say what grade they deserve.

Seamus Searson is general secretary, Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association.

WHAT should have been a fairly straight-forward process has become a bit of a mess. We’ve spoken to the SQA a number of times, even when they were receiving the results, saying “if there are issues, would you not engage with particular schools prior to the publication of results?” We urged them to do that – we’re not talking about 30,000 schools here, just 400, so it shouldn’t have been that difficult. It’s in nobody’s interests to have the mess we have at the moment – this is the last headache we need. 

A little bit of a tweak we can all understand. First of all, teachers were told “we’ve got an emergency, we need you to rely on your professional judgement” – now this has made it very difficult for teachers to trust that judgement. It’s created worry.

“We need to see the full reasoning for this. If they used something as crude as postcodes, then that is very wrong. The SQA already had data on anyone who had sat their Nat 5s or Highers the previous year. The only year group we saw a potential difficulty with was those doing Nat 5s for the first time because they would have been unknowns to the SQA. Yet the Nat 5s sailed through – they weren’t the problem. What went wrong wasn’t at the teachers’ end, it was the administrators’ end. The SQA used a very crude tool to make the decisions that they made. They’ve created a problem for themselves. 

As teachers, we’ve got enough on our plates at the moment with going back to school next week. Our members really haven’t got the time to be involved in the appeals process while trying to think about social distancing and keeping everyone safe, so which is the priority?

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I think people have been realistic with their grades. If there are schools that have overestimated, which ones were they? Could that have happened where the parental pressure is higher on the school, rather than at the other end – schools that have had a fairly decent record? 

We don’t know yet. A lot of this seems to focus on prelims. They’re a fairly decent indicator for what the young person’s likely to get, but sometimes teachers, when they do them, are trying to give pupils an aspiration of what they could achieve if they put the effort in. 

They’re trying to be encouraging, but it could be that some parents and pupils have taken it that if the prelim says they’re going to get a B, they’re going to get a B at the final exam.

The SQA have been the tail wagging the dog for a long time. 
Sometimes we think they’re not in the real world. 
After 130 years of exams, we should be able to find a better way of doing it, rather than end-loading everything.”

Vickie Hardie, is the mother of a fifth year pupil at Eyemouth High School in Berwickshire. 

THE system stinks. How can you mark down deprived schools by 15%? I am absolutely devastated for all those wonderful clever kids in fifth year at Eyemouth who were destined for As and have been downgraded. They have been not only robbed of working towards getting a better result after their prelims but now they have been robbed of the results they already had in their prelims.
Eyemouth is a brilliant school that got a wonderful inspection result and this is not fair on the kids or teachers.

Because it is a deprived school the whole year has been cut by 15%. That is not fair because the other schools were cut by 6.8% or something like that.

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My son Lewis’s year group are incredibly clever. They are really academic and one girl has been straight As all the way through but got one A and rest are all Bs. There are only two straight As as far as I know in the entire school. In Higher English more than half were targeted to get As but there were only two As so that’s not good at all.

With Lewis every single one of his grades was down one. He is a bright kid and he works. His prelims were all right as he had two As, two high Bs and a high C so he was targeted at three As and two Bs but he said he was going to work hard and get five As. What he got was three Bs and two Cs and no As at all. He wants to be a vet so he needs four As and a B and the school is appealing all of his grades.
Another of his friends got straight As right through school then got one A and the rest were Bs, yet he is a very clever boy.

They have based it on the grades of pupils in previous years but even if they had looked at the National 5 results from last year they would have seen it was an exceptional year.

They should have gone ahead with the exams. In Eyemouth they have a massive gym hall and they could have held exams in there and had them all spaced out, it would have been easy.

Cancelling them was a huge mistake and then the SQA didn’t share with anyone how they came up with those things until the exam results came out. 

That’s bad and they haven’t looked at any of the evidence.  The school is hoping that now it is sending in the evidence the appeals will go through but obviously there is going to be hundreds of them. 

If they had done a percentage across the board that would have been fairer.