MSPs pass legislation to scrap SQA for new Scottish exams body
Holyrood has passed legislation that will abolish Scotland's exam body – despite claims from opposition parties that the replacement organisation is 'little more than a rebrand'.
Both Labour and the Conservatives voted against the Bill, which will dissolve the Scottish Qualifications Authority, and set up a new organisation, to be called Qualifications Scotland to take its place.
This is expected to be up and running in the autumn of 2025 – after this year's exams results come out.
It comes almost five years after the 2020 exams scandal, where marks for more than 124,000 youngsters were downgraded after exams had to be scrapped as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
But Labour education spokesperson Pam Duncan-Glancy said: 'Instead of abolishing the SQA today the Bill allows the current leadership to transfer wholesale.'
She insisted that 'on reform this is a job unfinished'.
Similarly, Scottish Conservative education spokesperson said the changes, in the Education (Scotland) Bill would not deliver the 'meaningful reform for Scotland's education system which is urgently needed'.
He argued that the new exams body was 'little more than a rebrand of the SQA'.
Briggs said: 'The SQA needed an overhaul, not a cosmetic makeover, and the changes proposed fall way short of what is required to ensure the organisation can operate effectively and is properly accountable.'
But speaking as the legislation was passed by 69 votes to 47, eeducation secretary Jenny Gilruth rejected those claims.
Instead, she said, the Bill would 'fundamentally create a new and a different type of organisation which works with the teaching profession differently'.
In addition it will establish a new chief inspector of education, who will be tasked with inspecting nurseries, schools and colleges across Scotland.
Here she said there was a 'cast-iron guarantee' that the person who takes up this post would have 'suitable teaching and educational leadership experience'.
The education secretary said: 'Through the creation of a new qualifications body and an independent inspectorate, the Bill enables a more responsive, trusted and effective national education infrastructure.'
The legislation, passed after two nights of late sittings at Holyrood, will provide 'the scaffolding which supports the wider range of education reform', she added.
Briggs, however, said: 'It does feel like the Bill has been rushed through Parliament in the last week of term.'
He added that 'this Bill has not been the opportunity many of us had hoped it would be', claiming it was 'clear SNP ministers' policies and half-baked reforms are not delivering for our young people'.
Duncan-Glancy was also critical, saying: 'We needed a qualifications system fit for the future, one that respects the efforts of learners, supports the judgment of teachers, and earns the trust of employers and universities.
'We needed a curriculum that is broad and inclusive, we needed an inspectorate that can challenge where necessary but also celebrate excellence. But on reform this is a job unfinished.'
Gilrtuh said afterwards: 'The successful passage of this legislation shows this Government is serious about implementing the changes needed to drive improvement across Scotland's education and skills system.
'The creation of a new, national qualifications body is about building the right conditions for reform to flourish – the new body will ensure that knowledge and experience of pupils and teachers are at the heart of our national qualifications offering.
'The new inspectorate body will also have greater independence and the power to set the frequency and focus of inspections, moving this function away from ministers, to His Majesty's Chief Inspector.'
She added: 'Taken together, our major programme of education and skills reform will bring about the changes needed to meet the needs of future generations of young people.'
Get all the latest news from around the country Follow STV News
Scan the QR code on your mobile device for all the latest news from around the country
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
37 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
STEPHEN DAISLEY: As MSPs head for the beaches, a question... Would we REALLY be any worse off if they just didn't come back?
Imagine it is May 2021, a few weeks on from the Scottish parliament election, the sixth such poll held since devolution began. Only this time it's different. This time, Holyrood doesn't reconvene. No presiding officer is elected, no oaths taken, no committee conveners appointed. The parliament lies empty. It goes on like this for weeks, then months, until it becomes apparent that MSPs will never show up. The reason for their absence is unimportant. Maybe they've secured more gainful employment as a travelling circus, a major career change insofar as it would involve travelling. In every other way, however, there is continuity. Schools stay open, the NHS groans on, police still investigate your tweets, and councils empty your 15 wheelie bins sporadically while charging rates that would force the Emir of Qatar into a payment plan. All remains as before, budgets are allocated to services, but the 2021-26 parliament never sits and never passes legislation. Question: can you think of a single way in which you would have been worse off under this scenario? I ask because MSPs have just packed up their offices for summer recess, the last before the forthcoming Scottish parliament election, which must be held by the first week of May 2026. But as the politicians root around for their buckets and spades, I've been digging through the record of this parliamentary year and indeed the entire session, which is what prompted my little thought experiment. Because this parliament is surely the most insubstantial and inconsequential since the dawn of devolution. A do-nothing assembly that, on the occasions when it rouses itself to action, confirms the wisdom of its original instinct. It is this parliament which brought forward the final draft of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, rammed through Holyrood in a marathon run of late-night sittings shortly before Christmas 2022. Women's rights campaigners and legal scholars cautioned that its plans for self-identified gender changes would fall foul of Britain-wide equalities legislation, not least when it came to single-sex spaces. Parliament would not listen and then received the ultimate slap-down when Scottish Secretary Alister Jack made history and became the first holder of his office to block a Holyrood bill. The Scottish parliament fumed but the Court of Session sided with Mr Jack. MSPs had no cause for pique. Most showed themselves to be singularly incurious when it came to gender legislation, satisfied to regurgitate the dubious talking points of taxpayer-funded lobby groups rather than doing their jobs as legislators. Pursuing self-ID was a Nicola Sturgeon pet project, but it was also necessitated by her reckless decision to bring the Greens into government, handing ministerial power to an anti-capitalist doomsday cult that hitches its yurt to every policy fad on the go. This included the deposit return scheme, a thoroughly reasonable notion in theory, until Lorna Slater got her hands on it and drove it into the ground, alienating small businesses along the way. And in return for the votes of these ego-warriors, sensible, long-standing Scottish Government positions had to be jettisoned. An undertaking to fully dual the A96, a notorious accident blackspot, was diluted down to the weakest water. Despite the inclusion of an environmentalist party in Scotland's government, St Andrew's House missed target after target in its loudly proclaimed quest to cut emissions. Eventually, Holyrood scrapped annual and interim targets altogether. Failure has been a hallmark of this parliament. Take the PISA report confirming that performance in maths, science and reading continues to slump and Scottish schoolchildren lag behind their English counterparts in all three. Take the attainment gap, the closure of which Sturgeon asked to be judged on. It has widened, but that cannot be pinned on the former First Minister alone. It was the duty of parliament to hold her to account, but this parliament could not rise to its obligations. In this session, Holyrood has seen three First Ministers (so far) and neither Sturgeon, nor Humza Yousaf, nor John Swinney could be said to have feared parliament very often. All three warrant a share of the blame for the post-Covid NHS recovery that never materialised. For the habitually missed emergency care and cancer treatment waiting times. For the shame of elderly people forced to part with their life savings to pay for hip and cataract operations. Holyrood, the guardian of the people's interests, has attached no meaningful political price to this dire record. The same can be said of the Ferguson Marine fiasco, a slow-motion catastrophe that a more diligent and effective parliament could have stopped in its tracks. Yet as with so many of the topics at issue, MSPs, and we're talking specifically about Nationalist MSPs, chose to put party before country and keep their mouths shut. They saw their remit as that of parliamentary clapometers, there to make noise but not trouble. Taxpayers, especially those who rely on islands transport, bore the brunt of their cowardly partisanship. That word right there – 'partisan' – might just be a one-word summation of Holyrood's problem. Too many of its members regard themselves as components of a political bloc instead of elected representatives tasked with challenging, scrutinising and checking executive power. Recall how Nationalist MSPs rallied round Michael Matheson after he tried to bill the taxpayer for his holiday iPad use. A more basic test of fidelity, whether it is owed to parliament or exclusively to party, there could not be. And dozens of MSPs failed it. Holyrood is a parliament in which parliamentarians are in the minority. There is very little reason to expect things will improve in the eight months that remain when MSPs return from summer recess. This session will end with as much distinction as it has conducted itself thus far, and of what comes next we can only guess. Donald Dewar promised so much of Holyrood but even if he had been more circumspect, what we've got could only be a source of acrid disappointment. Who can say if things would be better had devolution never happened, but it's hard to imagine they could be any worse. This column began with a thought experiment, and it ends with another. Imagine you were given the opportunity to return to September 11, 1997, the day of the Scottish parliament referendum, retaining full knowledge of what has happened in the quarter century since Scots voted for legislative devolution. You head to your polling station, go into the booth, and poise your pencil over the paper. This time around, you know what's coming. The paucity of ambition, the dearth of delivery, the inevitability of failure. Much will not get better, some things will get worse, and the poor and vulnerable will pay the price. There will be mediocrity, ineptitude and cliquishness. The thinly veiled resentment towards its own people of a provincial elite that yearns only for the approval of international elites. A culture of secrecy, an aversion to scrutiny, and a closed-ranks hostility to anyone who speaks out of turn. This will be a parliament in which truth and conscience are in constant submission to party and power. The ballot before you asks you to choose between two options: 'I agree that there should be a Scottish parliament' or 'I do not agree that there should be a Scottish parliament'.
Daily Mirror
37 minutes ago
- Daily Mirror
'Keir Starmer is sowing the seeds of bigger political battles ahead'
Skyrocketing military spending is Keir Starmer's Achilles' heel when funding a dubious splurge will make the welfare crisis appear a picnic. Because thinking of a number, doubling it then adding some more without a clue where the cash comes from- fresh deep cuts, tax rises, higher borrowing? - is a £30billion ticking time bomb. Our under-fire Prime Minister could be forgiven should he go to bed cursing not Vladimir Putin but Donald Trump when the Kremlin's Oval Office bullies him and other European leaders into squandering precious extra resources on rearmament. Britain's near £60billion last year confirmed us in the world's half-dozen top spenders, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and there's little confidence a wasteful, profligate Ministry of Defence would deploy the windfall wisely. Starmer's sowing the seeds of bigger political battles ahead even as he utters mea culpas for a battered first 12 months. Stick to the panicky Nato 3.5% or 5% target, both figures would be damaging when the UK's below 2.5% and the raided aid budget is shrivelled, and a 2028 or 2029 General Election will be a minefield for whoever is Labour leader or, for that matter, heading the Tories, Reform and Lib Dems. Enhancing living standards and transforming key public services such as education and justice, health enjoying deservedly reviving injections, would be nigh on impossible to promise realistically in a second term manifesto alongside tanks, destroyers and nuclear bombers. Distracted Starmer blaming international summits and the Middle East for taking his eye off the benefits ball, failing to appreciate Labour rebels put their country first, party second to champion the disabled, is a potential reset, a restart, a relaunch, ahead of Friday's anniversary of a Westminster landslide from a different age. The optimism's vanished, vanquished by own goals over winter fuel, free spectacles and, Tuesday's Commons vote will attest, welfare, yet all is far from lost for him and Labour. Deeply unhappy Labour MPs are heard contemplating life after Sir Keir, ears of deputy Angela Rayner and Health Secretary Wes Streeting likely to be buring. Up in the polls, Nigel Farage and Reform could repeat the shooting star crash of Roy Jenkins and the SDP back in the early 1980s. David Cameron and George Osborne were pronounced for the hot pot during the 2012 pasty tax furore before winnin a Tory majority in 2015. Starmer may have up to four years to put it all right but the PM needs a plan to avoid plummeting into that defence black hole he dug to appease Trump. Obscenity not glamour was paraded in Venice with Forbes calculating the Jeff Bezos-Lauren Sanchez grotesque nuptials may have cost upwards of £20million. As the only Socialist Senator in the USA, Bernie Sanders, reminded us, kids go hungry and 60% of Americans live paycheque to paycheque while a super-wealthy oligarchic class party at the expense of the impoverished many. Britain has its filthy rich and dirt poor too with relatively lightly taxed tycoons now threatening to up sticks and flee abroad should a wavering Treasury require this entitled bunch to pay a slightly fairer share, Eggheads Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson's groundbreaking 2009 study, The Spirit Level, demonstrated how equality is better for everyone and fairer societies are happier countries. So to put a smile on our faces I'm offering to drive to Heathrow in my nine-year-old Sunderland-built Nissan Qashqai any bloodsucking parasites doing us a favour by leaving. I Don't Want to Talk About It when I'm a big fan of his music but rock legend Rod Stewart can be a leg end over politics. Long viewed as a Tartan Tory despite a 2024 Labour flirtation courtesy of influential wife Penny Lancaster, there are two reasons why It's a Heartache that Rod's suddenly giving, as he puts it, Nigel Farage a chance. The first is ignorance, Rod falling hook, line and sinker for the lie Starmer sold out Scottish fishing when the PM in fact netted a big catch for the industry by persuading the EU to cut export red tape while rolling over Boris Johnson's trawler deal. And the second is fishy Farage is essentially the same slippery Putin fan boy criticised by Rod in 2024 for parroting the Kremlin line that the West provoked Russia into invading Ukraine. Music and politics are never plain Sailing. It's no wonder some asylum seekers work on the side when they receive not untold riches but £1.42 a day in accommodation with meals provided or £7.03 if they must buy their own grub, clothing and toiletries. The only folk who earn a fortune from a multi-billion broken system bequeathed to Labour by incompetent Tories are spiv bosses exploiting willing hands barred from employment and Fat Cat landlords and hoteliers milking taxpayers. Ending the ban on newcomers legally taking jobs while awaiting decisions on whether they stay or go would allow them to pay their own rent and bills as well as tax and save us a small fortune. It's a no-brainer. The Reform, Tory and Labour politicians opposed are the ones costing up a packet. With foreshortened limbs the Commons' only visibly physically disabled member, talk of Marie Tisdall's fraught call with Rachel Reeves emphasised the value of the Penistone MP's insights and why the Chancellor was dangerously marooned on the wrong side of benefit cuts. Tory ex-Minister George Freeman reporting himself for investigation despite insisting he broke no rules leaves us wondering when these money-grabbing second-jobber will learn after emails showed the MP asked a company paying him £5,000 a month for eight hours work to help draft Parliamentary questions. 'ALL life is sacred. And I find it pretty revolting we've got to a state in this conflict where you're supposed to sort of cheer on one side or the other like it's a football team.' I'm with Wes Streeting after Glastonbury rapper Bob Vylan nauseatingly led crowds chanting 'death, death to the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]' yet the bigger outrage at the mo is the actual relentless, ongoing wholesale slaughter of innocent Palestinians in Gaza and settler killings in the occupied since West Bank since that horrific Hamas pogrom.
The National
an hour ago
- The National
Welfare state is being treated not as a shared good, but as a burden
Supporters are told to welcome these as signs of pragmatism, but they reveal only a fake-it-till-you-make-it government clinging to the same austerity logic that's gutted public services for more than a decade. There's no strategy of principled adaptation, just damage control masquerading as radical policy-overhaul. READ MORE: Wes Streeting forced to admit Labour wants fewer people claiming PIP Like cynical venture capitalists who asset-strip football clubs, this government treats the welfare state not as a shared good but as a historical burden. Public support systems are remodelled with fewer seats, less atmosphere, and none of the legacy. Cuts are proposed, resisted, and delayed, but always within the logic of managed decline. First they tried to demolish the Kop end stand, now they promise only future fans will be excluded. Proclaiming progress, the luscious playing surface is narrowed and replaced with astroturf. Starmer and his front bench echo the language of 'toughness' while attacking the right to protest and doubling down on hostile-environment policies. Protesters are kettled, marches are banned, and dissent is criminalised by degrees. All this while far-right groups openly organise to infiltrate and co-opt Reform UK, talking of 'seizing control' and reshaping elections by 2030. READ MORE: Scottish Labour MP not 'proud' of Keir Starmer's first year in charge These are not fringe figures. They're part of a co-ordinated ecosystem of antisemitism, Islamophobia, authoritarianism and conspiracism – emboldened by silence and triangulation. Instead of calling it out, however, Labour's leadership seems content to play the same game: pinned in the six-yard box, offering managerial discipline while the far right runs rings around them and takes audacious pot-shots. Picture ex-Scotland manager Craig Levein's infamous 6-4-0 formation against the Czech Republic, but fielding only newly drafted players who might be loyal, but have no experience in big games. Those of us pushed to the margins – disabled people, migrants, Muslims, and working-class communities – know what happens when the centre tries to outflank the right. Rights are lost and protections evaporate. We vanish from the headlines, except when someone from a marginalised group sells their soul for a front-bench post to prop up the attack on their own team. More of us end up in poverty, detention, or despair. READ MORE: Home Office staff concerned over 'absurd ban on Palestine Action' Meanwhile, Number 10 parades like champions of Europe, running victory laps over a non-league economy. The fans are left with crumbling public services – akin to Manchester United fans getting drenched beneath Old Trafford's increasingly dilapidated roof. And though our elected manager and board point to victories of old, it's clear they're preparing to flog the stadium that is the UK to the highest bidder, while calling it progress. There's still time to fight this decline, but only if leaders stop hiding behind spreadsheets and rediscover the courage to name what we're up against: a political slide toward exclusion, authoritarianism, and resentment – selling the strongest players in the name of a squad rebuild. The public knows the difference between real change and stage-managed retreat. Delivering anything less than what's needed means not just losing the match, but the risk of relegation and surrendering the values on which the club's success was genuinely built. Ron Lumiere via email FOLLOWING Laura Webster's Saturday article on about Labour founding the welfare state, which has become a standard response by Labour hacks to every scenario: the Labour welfare state is a myth. The welfare state was agreed, with minor differences, by the wartime coalition. Bismarck had a welfare state in the 1870s and he was no socialist either; he wanted a race of supermen. The Brits had to acknowledge that the German soldier was fitter, taller and better educated, like the Channel Islands' children after German occupation. READ MORE: We investigate the state of the welfare state – read our new series England did not achieve public education till the 1870s, due to opposition by the controlling Church of England. The Church of Scotland had no wish to control public education in Scotland, which has been free since the reformation. Incidentally, Catholic education legislation was introduced at the turn of the last century by a Liberal government, not because they were sympathetic to Catholicism, but because the wanted to create divisions in Scotland. Incidentally, there are no 'Prodistent' schools in Scotland, merely non-denominational schools where Catholic and other-denomination pupils and teachers are more common than most people realise. It was a Liberal minister in World War One, Winston Churchill, who introduced free milk, because of the poorer state of the British working class compared to German wartime recruits. The architect of the welfare state was the Liberal Lord Beveridge. Lords Wilson and Callaghan introduced further austerity and pay freezes etc. Donald Anderson Glasgow IF Westminster taxed the rich cheats who threw money at Brexit so they could avoid the new EU laws on tax havens, they would bring in way more cash than they will get from hitting the poor and disabled. They could close the loopholes the government deliberately creates and make everyone pay their tax. Loopholes are actually government-created corruption. Labour could recover if they taxed the rich – as long as Israel doesn't mind, of course. Bill Robertson via email
