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You will, I’m sure, already have seen lots about the 2024 exam results.

The headline figures are bad. Pass rates are down and attainment gaps are at record levels. Things are now worse than they were before the pandemic.

Last weekend I also had a look at some of the lesser-noticed details in the exam data, breaking down things like entry levels for non-traditional courses, progress rates between National 4 and National 5, and the reality for pupils with additional support needs and disabilities. You can read all of that here.

As part of that story I examined the changing pass rates for different subjects at Higher to find out which had seen the biggest declines. There are a few different ways to look at the issue but what I noticed was that, no matter how you cut it, History seems to be a cause for concern – not least because the Higher pass rate has dropped by 13 percentage points in a single year.

The SQA publishes information about the average scores for different parts of each exam, so it is actually possible to drill down a little bit further into this problem. When you do, you see that the national average score for Paper 2 in Higher History – the exam paper dealing with Scottish history – fell by more than 25% in just twelve months. In paper 1, the drop was 18%.

When TES Scotland asked the SQA about the falling pass rate for the........

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