Trust the teachers if we're going to get over this mess; Education

Make no mistake about it: this is the most serious crisis of credibility ever to have affected Scottish education. The Highers are the main quality check on the school system, and one of the main means of maintaining standards in higher education. Impugning their integrity brings into question the system as a whole. For Sam Galbraith this crisis is what his period as education minister will be remembered for.

The short-term crisis is rather more immediate for the 147,000 candidates who have been hung out to dry this week. Add in their family and friends, and you have about three quarters of a million very angry people just now. That's more than 15% of the whole population. To put that in crude political terms - in the apparently vain hope of making the Scottish government recognise the scale of the fiasco - nearly three-quarters of Labour and LibDem MSPs have majorities of less than 15%.

We now have a partial fix to one part of the problem, but the SQA is not yet out of the woods because the level of errors it has so far admitted (5%) is too low to explain the worrying stories that have been reported - such as schools in which almost the entire fifth year have been failed in a subject. The horrifying possibility looms that the SQA has simply lost large amounts of internal assessment data, and that it will have to go back to schools - yet again - to recover it.

Next there are the appeals. Normally there are about 18,000 appeals, and I'd expect many more this year because an appeal triggers a reassessment of the candidate's exam papers. Dealing with an avalanche of appeals would take months.

And then it goes on into next year. The obvious point is that quality checks have to be demonstratively reliable. It's a bit like the vastly over-engineered Forth Rail Bridge. When the Tay Bridge collapsed in 1879, the engineers of the Forth crossing decided to go way over the top, building a structure that is far safer than it has to be in order to reassure the public. The SQA must do the same - but of course, that will be enormously expensive.

One elementary thing it could do would be to involve teachers. Teachers spotted problems last spring, but their worries were dismissed. They have to be built into the quality management loop - not merely as powerless victims of targets and performance indicators, but as the people ultimately in charge of monitoring quality. Trust them. Aberdeen University has taken the lead in doing just that this week, admitting students on the basis of teachers' predictions. Scottish education would be a lot better if trusting teachers became its basis.

What about the long term? People could be forgiven for believing that this catastrophe is a consequence of the reformed exam system itself. It is highly complex, involving five levels of awards (only three of which ran this year), new subjects and new certificates that show achievement in "core skills" (such as literacy) as well as subject passes. It involves unprecedented amounts of internal assessment by schools. And there are more candidates - probably over 80,000 for the three levels combined - in contrast to just 60,000 last year.

So how did we get here? It all goes back to the late 1980s, when the last two years of high school were being transformed demographically. The proportion of students who stayed on into fifth year rose from 39% in 1981 to 57% in 1990, reaching 70% in 1998. That was a much more diverse group than the mainly academic students for whom the Higher had been devised back in 1888.

The problems were investigated by a committee chaired by Professor John Howie, which reported in 1992 that one-third of fifth year students achieved no Highers passes at all, and a further 18% gained only one. The gaps had been partly filled since 1984 by the system of vocationally oriented National Certificates, but these were regarded as low-status and of questionable rigour.

Hence the attempt at a system this year in which all courses become part of the same structure. Crucial to this are Intermediate courses - the bridges that allow weaker students to reach Higher grade in sixth year and hence to university.

Few people have opposed this, because it does seem to offer new opportunities. Teachers have been unhappy mainly about the speed of its introduction.

So what happens next probably should stick to the underlying idea. But big changes are needed. Four are particularly important:

lThe government needs to put in much greater resources - for example to recruit enough markers next year and reintroduce the quality checks that the old Highers system used to have.

lThe SQA needs to address teachers' concerns about the curriculum. For example, teachers of English say their subject has been denuded of the literary basis which has always formed its core.

lThere needs to be proper representation from the universities on the assessment panels that oversee the exams. There used to be in the old days, but the academics are currently being thrown out by the SQA.

lThere needs to be a sharp reduction in the amount of internal assessment, probably cutting it back to just one exam using the same style as the old prelims.

The repercussions of this mess are going to take years to overcome - years of carefully rebuilding confidence and reputation. And it will work only if the new system is genuinely the property of everyone, not just of the leadership class mired in their disastrous complacency.

Lindsay Paterson is professor of educational policy at Edinburgh University

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