Chamber and committees

It did not work though, did it? Otherwise, we would not have seen the attainment gap widening again.

You put in place significant mitigations to adjust grade boundaries, and that did not deliver the result that you expected. It delivered the status quo, going back to the pre-pandemic period. All the measures that you took were to make things easier for you to produce a result that was acceptable. That did not provide intensive support to young people to help them to catch up on their learning, did it?

Does it make you angry that you are presiding over an exams system that is failing our young people who have the greatest educational challenges? Does that cause you to raise concern with the Scottish Government about the approach elsewhere in the system? You have come in at the end to help to tidy up and mask the fact that young people have been failed for the third year in a row.

I am happy to end there, convener. I would just say that a fair education system is one in which everyone has an equal opportunity, but I am not clear that that has happened this year.

Have other people experienced that issue? I am particularly interested in whether teaching staff are present on smaller campuses or whether there is now a move to beam people in to teach.

Heather Innes touched on the consistency of investment across smaller campuses. I am interested in whether there is a uniform position or whether smaller campuses tend to miss out.

A second issue is whether staff are always there on smaller campuses. It is not just about students being on campus. With the move towards more digital delivery, I have had feedback that teaching staff are often not present on smaller campuses, or they are beamed in from other sites. Have you experienced that?

It will not come as a surprise to anyone on the committee to hear about the challenges that you have in communicating that to the SQA. I wonder whether the issue goes wider, to politicians, the Parliament and the Government, too. We all say that college education is important and that colleges have a key role, but is the political support there to make parity of esteem real? That might be a difficult question.

I want to go back to the point about parity of esteem. I am interested in your views on whether, in the policy that is coming from the Parliament and the Government, the message is strong enough in support of college education.

The role of local authorities in the pandemic will certainly be considered, but Mr Fairlie’s argument is, in effect, that we should not legislate at this time, that we should wait for the public inquiry and that we should wait until we know the shape of any future threat before putting very definite things on the statute book.

The problem is that what we are considering is putting wide-ranging and very loose powers in the hands of the Government. These amendments—and amendment 120 in particular—set out balancing provisions. If you want wide-ranging non-specific powers for an unknown future pandemic, you will have to accept that there might be limitations in that respect. That is why the better approach would have been, as has been set out at length, to have draft legislation ready and agreed that could be continually reviewed and considered and then implemented quickly.

I do not have a great deal to add. This comes down to balance and who knows young people best. Even in a national response to a pandemic, there must be recognition that those on the ground who make the day-to-day decisions are often best placed to make those difficult balancing judgments. There is no one else to make them; there is no one else who can consider the individual circumstances of a young person to that level. The idea that the Government is best placed to take all those decisions on its own is one of the fundamental problems with the bill as drafted. In fact, that was not the experience during the pandemic. The provisions that I propose, or something similar, need to be in the bill.

I press amendment 113.

I say politely to the member that I think that the use of historical data at a school level in a way that impacts the grades of other young people is wrong. In addition, when grades were changed on the basis of an algorithm, and when ministers were aware of the information and chose not to act, those were mistakes—that is why changes were made later. Young people deserve a guarantee that such things will not happen again.

I go back to Mr Mason’s point in relation to some of the other amendments, which relate to areas such as the financial impact. Again, we hear that the Government would not, in a future pandemic, do this or that, but we do not know who the Government or the ministerial office holders are going to be at that point. Putting some of these things in the text of the bill, rather than relying on guidance or regulation, therefore offers much stronger protection to those who may be impacted.

I could go on for some time, but I know that members have travel plans.