Like many households across Scotland with teenagers, last week our home saw a flurry of excitement over exam results. The outcome of the Nationals 4 and 5, Highers and Advanced Highers arrived through the post or on text messages, being greeted either with joy or dismay.
It is customary for politicians at these times to congratulate all the young people who have done so well, and the teachers who guided them to what are, hopefully, good outcomes and better opportunities for their lives ahead. However, it is also necessary to take a cool, hard look at what exactly these results tell us.
There was certainly an attempt to put a positive spin on the overall numbers by the SNP Education Secretary, Jenny Gilruth, who highlighted that the number of pupils achieving an A-C grade across all levels has increased compared to last year.
Whether this tells us much in itself is debatable. Pass grades will always vary, due to a variety of factors, not least the relative difficulty of the exam papers. Just because the pass rates increase doesn’t necessarily mean that either pupils or schools are performing better, and of course the converse is equally true.
I can well remember a recent conversation with a retired maths teacher who lamented the fact that, in her opinion, Higher maths exam papers were easier than a generation ago, and therefore better pass rates were only to be expected.
Others will be better qualified than me to comment on the accuracy of that assessment, but it certainly appears to be a common view amongst those who have been within the teaching profession over a long period.
In assessing the overall impact of rising pass rates, we also need to look at the subjects being chosen by pupils. PE is now the third most popular subject being taken at Higher. In the experience of my youngsters and their peers, this is because they believe that PE is a subject which is easier to pass than, say, maths, chemistry or physics.
We also know that more children now choose a PE Higher than one in all modern languages put together, which surely must be of concern to the Education Secretary and schools.
A better comparison rather than simply looking at year-to-year changes in pass rates is to consider where Scottish education sits in relation to other countries. And here the picture is not so rosy. Outcomes in Scottish education have been in steady decline compared to many other countries, as evidenced by comparative international tests. It is hardly something to celebrate.
But our Education Secretary was particularly keen to seize on one figure last week, and that was the reduction in the attainment gap between pupils in most and least deprived communities. For Higher results, this has indeed declined, with the difference in attainment of A grades reducing from 22.1 percentage points last year to 22 in this year. When looking at all passes from A-C at Higher, there was no reduction at all, although for National 5s the reduction was more marked.
Those minimal improvements only reflect what has happened over the past 12 months. Look further back, and the story is even less positive. The attainment gap for all Higher passes has actually widened since 2019, when it sat at 16.9 percentage points.
None of this gives us much confidence that Scottish education is safe in the SNP’s hands. And what is most worrying is not Gilruth’s attempts to put such a positive spin on the figures, but the fact that, in 2016, the then SNP First Minister Nicola Sturgeon made closing the attainment gap a priority for her government, on which she asked to be judged. In the same year, her then Deputy and Education Secretary, John Swinney, said that he wanted to see the attainment gap “substantially eliminated” within ten years.
That just gives us one year to go with no significant progress having been made. No wonder my Conservative colleague Miles Briggs, who speaks for our party on education, responded by saying: “No amount of spin from them can avoid the fact that Nicola Sturgeon’s promises in relation to the attainment gap lie in tatters.”
In a week when we read wall-to-wall coverage of Sturgeon’s memoirs, there has been a great deal of commentary about her legacy. Yet, on the very topic that she wanted her leadership to be judged on, it has been shown to be a failure. Too many young Scots have been let down by nearly two decades of the SNP in power, and the inability to tackle the significant issues facing Scottish education.
None of this is due to a want of resources. Spending per head on Scottish pupils substantially outranks that south of the Border, perhaps by as much as 20 per cent or more, and yet educational outcomes in England are significantly better than here.
It is a reality that the education reforms in England over the same period that the SNP have been in power here, delivered either from Labour or Conservative governments, have driven up standards and improved results.
In the meantime, the SNP have preferred a one-size-fits-all approach to Scottish schooling, and have stuck doggedly by the Curriculum for Excellence, which is clearly long past the point it needed to be ditched, or at the very least substantially revised.
Young people only get one chance at education. Despite the good work being done in Scottish schools, too many are being failed by an antiquated system that doesn’t recognise the challenges of the modern world.
Responsibility for that must rest at the door of SNP ministers, chief among them Nicola Sturgeon. That is how we should judge her legacy, not on self-serving memoirs.
Murdo's column was printed in The Scotsman on August 13, 2025.
