SQA should ‘take a short, hard look at themselves’, says expert

The Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) should “take a short, hard look at themselves”, an education expert has said.

Professor Ken Muir published a report earlier this month on reforms to the Scottish education system that urgently called on the SQA to “reflect” on its management structure, leadership and culture.

He told Holyrood’s Education, Children and Young People Committee that the authority would still have to look at its own practices, despite being slated to be scrapped and replaced in the coming years.

Prof Muir was given access to surveys of local government leaders and their perceptions of the SQA, in which he noticed something was “amiss”.

“Reading between the lines, although there wasn’t a lot of qualitative detail in that survey, you got a sense that there was something amiss within SQA in terms of the views of chief executives of councils, of council leaders, directors of education, the levels of confidence in SQA,” he said.

“All of that pointing very much to an organisation that very much needs to take a long, hard look at itself – or a short, hard look at itself, more likely, as opposed to a long, hard look.

“There are a number of things – culture, leadership and governance – that I think are three keys that current executive management team needs to consider.”

Prof Muir also told the committee it would be a “challenge” for the new body being set up to have the confidence of the teaching profession with the same leadership.

“I suppose the issue is: are they able to and are they up for the kinds of radical changes to culture and governance?” he said.

“And some of them can be fixed fairly quickly.”

When asked how far back he believes issues with the SQA have stretched back, the professor said he believed it to be “slightly longer than the Covid period”.

“Of course, over recent years we’ve had the issue about unit assessments within national qualifications and whether they’re part of it and whether they’re not.

“So all of that, and I think how it was handled generally, contributed to a very strong view that the organisation needed to be at least reformed if not replaced.”

The issues with the SQA were, however, “exacerbated” by Covid-19, Prof Muir told the committee.

When asked by Tory MSP Oliver Mundell if he believed it should have taken a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and his own review for the SQA to see the issues it faced, Prof Muir said: “No, I don’t think it should have.

“I think one of the values of my report and the reports that were issued that accompany my report is that SQA uses them as a mirror to reflect on how they plan to go forward, given they have been given a stay of execution until 2024.”

He added: “I would hope that they would do that in prompt fashion, for the very reasons that we’ve discussed throughout all of this – that these are children and young people who are being most affected by the changes that are taking place in the education system and in society more generally.”