Peter Weir is right to hold firm on school award grading system

The learning of children has been severely disrupted. Disadvantaged pupils will have suffered most of all, but few children will emerge unscathed.

The amount of home learning has varied greatly from school to school and family to family, but even the children who have received the best teaching will not have had the school experience that they would have done.

Among the biggest challenges is the awarding of grades for pupils who would have been sitting some of the most important exams of their lives, GCSEs and A-levels.

The education minister Peter Weir, who was entirely right to say that schools will return in full in autumn, is also right to resist what would, in effect, be massive grade inflation.

The method of teacher assessment is profoundly unsatisfactory, and inherently unfair, but there is no alternative.

Much of the blame for this lies with an educational and political establishment which failed to battle to reopen schools.

There is a strong case to be made that schools should barely have shut, and not at all for pupils in key exam years. This is what Sweden did. A raft of other European countries began to reopen their schools within weeks of Easter.

Since then the evidence that children are barely at risk from Covid-19 and that they do not spread it much has become all the more compelling. The damage to children from losing school time, on the other hand, is well established.

Scotland has now decided not to revise teacher gradings down, and created a fresh injustice. Grades will be far higher this year than in previous years, which diminishes the achievements of past pupils and distorts the overall gradings.

Mr Weir is right to stand firm and the Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment right to broaden scope for appeals from a deeply unsatisfactory grading system that was inevitable once schools were shut for so long.

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