Judgement day

Just back from a weekend in Scotland.

By coincidence (tenuous link alert) I discovered last week that I feature in a recent but unused (because of Covid) Scottish schools’ exam paper.

According to an email sent to Forest:

The SQA is the national qualification awarding body for schools & colleges in Scotland, responsible to the Scottish Government, and work on a not-for-profit, non-commercial basis.

Due to the impact of Covid-19 on school openings and on students’ learning, the Scottish Government decided that the National Qualifications examinations for National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher levels for 2020 and 2021 would not take place.

SQA intends to publish these question papers that would have been sat in the 2021 Diet as Past Papers on our public website as a free resource for schools, colleges and learners to use for future exam practice.

We have identified your organisation as holding copyright over material we would like to use in a Past Paper.

The material is a screen shot of a page on the Forest website. Listed as Source C, it’s a press release we issued on November 30, 2018, in response to the start of the ban on smoking in Scottish prisons.

Below the screen shot the paper invites pupils to:

Attempt the following question, using only the information in Sources A, B and C on page 08 and above.

To what extent are Sources A, B and C reliable?

You must provide an overall conclusion on the most reliable source of information.

So there we have it. My comments about the Scottish prison smoking ban feature in a Higher Modern Studies exam paper!

I’ve no idea what sources A and B are but I love the idea of 15-16 year-old pupils sitting in judgement on whether a Forest press release represents a ‘reliable source of information’!

I will of course give permission for the SQA to use the material. If that’s my only legacy after 22 years’ working for Forest so be it.

What a pity though that the exam for which the paper was written will never take place.