It's almost a year since the exams algorithm fiasco, an education scandal which revealed the structural nature of social inequality across Britain.
Being the true pioneering nation that we are, the outcry began in Scotland, when thousands of pupils discovered they had been downgraded due to being from the wrong postcodes.
For days, then education secretary John Swinney insisted the formula designed to calculate pupil’s grades was fair.
That without it, both exam results and the integrity of the Scottish education system would be threatened.
He’d have gotten away with it too, had it not been for those pesky kids.
Within 24 hours, Shettleston 6th year Erin Bleakley organised a resistance to the Scottish Government and the SQA. Young people held up banners that read, “judge our work, not our postcode”, “The SQA done us dirty” and “We Have Class, You Have Classism”.
There was nowhere left to hide, and Swinney announced that results would be reverted to teachers’ predicted grades – and offered a grovelling apology.
Similar tails-between-the-legs moments happened across the home nations.
It was a rare peak in an otherwise dreadful pandemic.
Evidently, the SQA and the Scottish Government have already forgotten it.
Keen to outdo themselves, this week it was announced that the appeals process for contesting this year’s results is to be turned into an administrative roulette machine.
Pupils are free to appeal – if they have the nerve – but must understand that if they do, their grade can go down as well as up. What a buzz!
Last year, in this fine paper, I wrote: “Let’s be frank – appeals processes are primarily a means of filtering out legitimate complaints of disadvantaged people in law, welfare, employment and education.
It is well understood that many have neither the means, time or know-how to formally ‘appeal’ decisions.”
It looks like the SQA and the Scottish Government panicked here, aware that by waiving the usual £40-or-so quid fee (which previously acted as a deterrent to questioning their wisdom), then they’d have to turbocharge some other quirky game mechanic to dissuade a bunch of kids from challenging them.
After all, we only have so many opportunities to distribute, and the good ones must go to the kids from the right postcodes.
This structural inequality is how the system authenticates itself.
It demonstrates its “integrity”, to those whose interests it is configured primarily to serve, by being deeply unfair.
Just like the algorithm itself, appeals processes often act as safety valves – flushing plebs out to make more room for the sharp elbows of East Ren’s finest.
Now, a couple of things must be pointed out in the interests of fairness.
Appealing exam results has always come with the risk of being downgraded – the issue here is that this remains a possibility after the most extraordinarily disrupted academic year since WWII.
It is also worth acknowledging that while this latest fiasco reveals just how gamed the system is, there are no easy solutions when it comes to the educational attainment gap unless we address structural inequality.
This is something the Scottish Government has little interest in doing because it would ruffle the feathers of its most electorally lucrative demographic, whose children happen to benefit from it.
It strikes me as unjust that we must put in place processes and mechanisms which prevent the poorest kids from rising above their station, while at the same time, saying nothing of the myriad advantages enjoyed by kids who attend the “best” schools.
They better hope wee Erin and her pals don’t get wind of this.
