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For years now, the Scottish Government has been promising to reform Scottish education – especially the examination and certification system used for students in the final three years of secondary school.
The main catalyst for this was the utterly disastrous handling of exams during the pandemic, but in truth the concerns had been bubbling away for a long time.
We put kids through a huge amount of exams in this country – more so than pretty much anywhere else – to no discernible benefit, wasting a huge amount of teaching time along the way.
That exam cycle then poisons the curriculum not just for students in the exam years, but also for those in the early stages of secondary school. In fact, some would argue that the rot it spreads goes even deeper, all the way down to primary education.
Our approach also clearly disadvantages a whole host of young people whose only crime is that they’re not quite the sort of person that our old and outdated system was built for, perhaps because they have........