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I am keen to hear the rationale for that. In the areas where local authorities excluded that data, such as those in my region, I heard much more from teachers and pupils, who came forward with concerns, because the one year in which the gap closed quite considerably was excluded for moderation purposes. Could you explain why you felt that it was appropriate to include 2020 data for moderation?

Larry Flanagan has distinguished a couple of times between the problems that were inherent in the ACM and those that were compounded by the lockdown period and school closures from January to March. When our predecessor committee was scrutinising the SQA last autumn and in the spring of this year, it was very hard to get an understanding of what scenario planning had been done for a period of prolonged school closure during the year. What is your understanding of the scenario planning that was done by the SQA and by the Scottish Government last summer? The answer that we often got was, essentially, just the repeated affirmation that schools were not going to close. Are you aware of any scenario planning being done on the impact of prolonged closure on the certification model?

Would Seamus Searson or Tara Lillis like to comment on scenario planning and whether that took place?

I would like to return to the questions around moderation and the issue that Oliver Mundell raised about the use of historical data. I completely understand the need for a level of moderation to ensure that an A grade in one school is equal to an A grade in another, but moderation that includes the use of historical data—school-level performance data—seems to do the opposite. We have had an attainment gap in Scotland for a long time—a socioeconomic attainment gap, as well as one between those with and those without additional support needs. Surely, any moderation system that uses historical data automatically puts more of a question mark over higher levels of achievement by young people from a deprived background compared with such levels of achievement by pupils from a more affluent background. If a class of higher pupils in Drumchapel had got straight As, that would have been viewed with more suspicion than a class of higher pupils from Newton Mearns or Clarkston having done so. How did you deploy a moderation system that included the use of historical data without simply having far more conversations with teachers at your schools in areas with higher levels of deprivation?

Would you like to come in, Audrey? I keep firing more questions at Tony, but I realise that I have not given you a chance to respond.

That sounds wearily like the exact same conversations that we were having this time last year.

I will move to a question on the moderation system. Seamus Searson, you listed the various levels of moderation that provisional grades had to go through before they were approved, and you spoke about the workload issue that that created. I am interested in the feedback that you have all had from your members about how much moderation changed grades from what a teacher might have initially been minded to give. Did that moderation process result in much in the way of grades changing, and was there a particular level at which that was most common? Did grades typically change on the basis of the conversations that were taking place at the faculty level within a school, or was it on the basis of conversations at a local authority level? Did the RIC-level moderation influence grade changes? Was there much change as a result of that process?

Tara Lillis, what was your members’ experience of this? Did you get similar feedback, or was there a different experience?

Thank you. I am sure that we will want to revisit that issue.

My next question goes back to Michelle Thomson’s initial line of questioning about the top-line measurements of “improving”, “maintaining” and “worsening”. I accept completely that that is the top line of what is a very detailed process and that there is much more granular data at every level beneath that. However, I am concerned that it might be a touch too simplified even for a top line.

For example, the active travel measurement is classified as “improving”, although it is very far from hitting the targets that the Scottish Government has set: 4 per cent of journeys are now made by cycling, whereas the 2020 target was for 10 per cent. Is there a danger that the “improving” classification simplifies some of the measurements slightly too much, in that a whole range of them could be improving only glacially, and not be on a trajectory towards the targets that have been set?

Thank you for that answer. I have no doubt that ministers are going into this in a far greater level of detail than just that top-line measurement. However, to go back to John Mason’s line of questioning, if we are trying to get wider buy-in from the public, the various levels of the state and the third sector, is there not a question about whether that measurement is a useful presentation for those who are engaging only at a surface level?

Given that both processes feed into the same framework, how do we prevent them becoming siloed?