With the recently published School Leaders Scotland manifesto advocating that we “move away from the exam-dominated attainment data and compliance-driven inspection judgements”, it’s worth considering why we have struggled to detach ourselves from high-stakes, end-point exams as the key way to judge our schools and the young people within them.

It’s over a decade since Professor Gert Biesta highlighted a tendency in education to value what we can easily measure, rather than working out how to measure what we really value. Ill-informed aspects of the media still enjoy ranking “Scotland’s best schools”, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest that our local and national evaluative processes should have a more nuanced approach to what “good” looks like and what we mean by attainment.

There is an uncomfortable duality at the heart of our system. On one hand, the Scottish government wants us to perform well for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Programme for International Student and Assessment (or the OECD and Pisa, to give their more recognisable names), broadly neo-liberal frameworks that view education as an endeavour primarily linked to economic competitiveness. There is an expectation of continuous improvement for every cohort, alongside the discomfort of a bell curve grade distribution that belies the notion that everyone can succeed.

Conversely, the General Teaching Council for Scotland standards and the National Improvement Framework charge us with delivering social justice and equity, though our qualifications and the country as a whole are anything but equitable. In effect, schools are asked to resolve macro-level, entrenched socioeconomic issues at the micro level of our individual classrooms, then be judged on critical summative assessments that are wholly inappropriate for many learners.

‘Inequity is baked in’

We talk about parity of esteem in our curriculum, but inequity is baked in. Schools like mine invest heavily in courses that support all young people, not just those who plan to go to university. But even if these students excel in non-examinable courses, their work is still worth fewer tariff points than an average performance in the examinable course next door.

We are charged with doing our best for young people, but still insist that their ability in mathematics, for example, is best measured in a couple of hours in a hot hall on a random day in May. We quite rightly put in place mitigations to support the almost 50 per cent of young people with additional support needs to take part in the exam diet, but it’s still far from accessible for too many.

The only time we got close to closing the gap in key attainment data was when the pandemic removed exams themselves. Excited speculation followed, backed up by the 2022 Muir report and the 2023 Hayward review. This was our chance for a paradigm shift, but it simply didn’t happen. Was conceiving an alternative truly beyond us?

Let’s take Robbie. Robbie came to us at the early stages of first-level numeracy, with a reading age of 8. Robbie won’t leave with a National 5 chemistry or a Higher history. Robbie won’t ever jump in the air after getting As on his Qualifications Scotland certificate. Robbie will remain stubbornly in the “lowest 20 per cent” part of the Insight bar graphs.

But Robbie is also in school on time every day, greets staff with friendly fist pumps and has the biggest smile for every peer. Robbie loves to help and, just yesterday, told me, “I’m holding the door open because it’s kind, and we are kind at Rosehill.” He is wonderful.

Once those exam statistics come out in August, Robbie will be “a gap”. I will be asked by my local authority to justify the scores on the door, as though only those in my school building had any impact on Robbie’s life chances. And it’s not because our central colleagues don’t understand that attainment is complex. It’s because they, in turn, must justify their own “performance” at a national level.

To paraphrase education policy researcher Professor Jenny Ozga, education talks about young people like social democrats but judges them like neo-liberals. If we’re serious about social justice, we need to find more creative ways of evaluating our schools.

Gail Preston is headteacher at Rosehill High School in East Lothian