I still think about that summer. The one where the world was already upside‑down, and then the SQA managed to tilt it a little further. When the Scottish Government applied that algorithm to the 2020 results – the one designed to bring outcomes in line with historical performance – it felt like watching a slow, quiet crime against ambition. Not a dramatic one. Not the kind that makes headlines for long. The kind that happens in spreadsheets, in boardrooms, in the gap between policy and lived experience.

As teachers, we know that year groups are not identical photocopies of one another. Some cohorts sparkle. Some struggle. Most sit somewhere in the middle, a scatter of strengths and gaps and personalities. That’s normal. That’s human. And in 2020, when we were asked to judge our pupils’ performance without exams, we did it with the same integrity we always bring to the job.

My National 5 English class that year was a lower set, but one which had really risen to the challenge of the course: one B, a handful of Cs, a few Ds, a couple of no awards. A class that had been fairly assessed. A class whose grades matched the evidence. We weren’t inflating anything. We weren’t trying to game the system. If anything, we were bracing ourselves for verification, expecting to be asked for samples, folders, jotters, timed pieces, anything to prove that what we were submitting was honest.
We were ready.

We were thorough. We were proud of the work our pupils had done.

And then the algorithm arrived.

Every single child in that class was reduced by a grade.

I remember sitting at my desk, staring at the screen, feeling the bottom drop out of my stomach. I cried. Not because of the workload, not because of the chaos of that year, but because I knew exactly what those grades meant to those young people, and how hard they had fought for them. They had already lost so much: routine, certainty, rites of passage, the quiet scaffolding of school life. And now they were being told, by a formula, that their effort didn’t count. The school you went to was all that mattered. You were your social class, nothing more.

Yes, the government reversed the decision. Yes, the original teacher‑judged grades were restored. But the damage wasn’t symmetrical. Schools in better‑off areas, the ones whose historical performance the algorithm favoured and that had seen their grades increased, kept the uplift they’d been given. Their inflated results stayed inflated. Meanwhile, our pupils, the ones who had been dragged down, were simply returned to where they started.

In a year of competition for university places, apprenticeships, jobs, and opportunities, that mattered. It mattered more than anyone in a press conference ever admitted.

Our pupils still lost out.

And I still think about that. About how ambition can be bruised not by failure, but by systems that don’t trust the people who know young people best. About how easily fairness can be bent out of shape when data is treated as destiny. About how quickly the voices of those most affected can be drowned out by the hum of “policy alignment” and “statistical moderation.”

I think about the faces of that class. Their relief when the grades were restored. Their confusion about why it happened in the first place. Their quiet resilience.

And I think they deserved better. They still do.

I suppose this came back to mind as I watched the man who oversaw this process as the then-education secretary be elected First Minister again last week.