TODAY we are publishing tables showing how schools were affected by this year’s SQA exam results fiasco.

We've taken the figures for Glasgow, East Renfrewshire, East Dunbartonshire and Glasgow's fee paying schools and put them in an easy format for parents to check how their child's school was affected.

A system introduced to ensure pupils were awarded grades after exams were cancelled due to the coronavirus crisis saw those from poorer backgrounds hit hardest by grade adjustments.

Data released by the SQA under Freedom of Information legislation has given figures showing the percentage of pupils at every Scottish school whose grades were marked down, increased and which went from a pass to a fail.

For the Glasgow City Council tables see here

The numbers show that St Paul’s High School faced the largest downgrade of Higher results of any state school in Scotland at 52.4%.

This compares to just 8.7% at Mearns Castle High School, in East Renfrewshire, where only a tiny minority of pupils are from deprived backgrounds.

Glasgow Times:

Our table gives the percentage of exam results adjusted from a pass to a fail; the percentage adjusted up; the percentage adjusted down; and the percentage of senior pupils from SIMD level one – the most deprived postcodes in Scotland.

The final figure is taken from the latest data available on the Scottish Government website while the other numbers were released following an FOI request by Glasgow

University education researcher Barry Black, who has published an academic blog post on the results that was then reviewed by the university’s Professor Catherine Lido.

This was the first time in more than 100 years that exams had been cancelled and the SQA developed an alternative system for awarding grades using teacher estimates, which were then moderated using an algorithm.

The moderation system failed to take into account the individual performance of pupils and instead looked at previous overall exam performance of schools.

But it soon become clear that young people from poorer backgrounds were suffering most from awards being downgraded.

An outcry led to 75,000 pupils being issued with new grades. The SQA also said it had “no regrets” about the system it had implemented.

After St Paul’s High School, Castlemilk and All Saints secondaries see 47% and 46% of grades adjusted down, respectively. Both schools have very high numbers of pupils from SIMD1.

Glasgow Gaelic School has the lowest figure at 17.3%.

By comparison, the highest level of downgraded awards in leafy East Renfrewshire was at Barrhead High School with 33%.

In East Dunbartonshire this was Kirkintilloch High at 35.5%, but at the other end of the table Lenzie Academy had 13.1%, more comparable with the results from fee-paying schools.

Glasgow Times:

In some cases, grades were adjusted upwards – with King’s Park Secondary seeing nearly 6% of grades increased, the highest in the three council areas we looked at.

Glasgow Times: