On 26 February 2026, the Scottish Qualifications Authority was formally dissolved, completing a transition that began when the Education (Scotland) Act 2025 established Qualifications Scotland as its replacement. For anyone who sat an exam in Scotland at any point since 1997, the SQA was one of the fixed features of the educational landscape — as familiar, and as frequently complained about, as school uniform policy or the weather during exam season. Its replacement has been described, with characteristic scepticism by The Scotsman, as potentially 'the same body with a different name.' Whether that proves true depends on what happens over the next six years — and on whether the system is willing to change not just the institution but the relationship between qualifications, curriculum, and what happens in classrooms.
Qualifications reform isn't happening in isolation — AI guidance and curriculum review are reshaping the system simultaneously.
What has changed
At the level of immediate experience, almost nothing. The 2026 exam diet runs as normal. Teachers are delivering the same courses. Pupils are sitting the same assessments. Approved centre status continues without interruption. The staff who ran the SQA now work for Qualifications Scotland. The qualifications themselves — National 4, National 5, Higher, Advanced Higher — are unchanged.
What has changed, at least on paper, is the governance and culture of the organisation. The Education (Scotland) Act 2025 establishes a new board structure with enhanced representation from teachers, learners, and other stakeholders. Qualifications Scotland has set up a Schools Partnership Team, led by a serving headteacher, with the explicit aim of being 'closer to the classroom' than the SQA was. And the organisation's founding rhetoric — from its CEO's description of the transition as 'a fundamental reset' to the governance provisions requiring learner and teacher voices in decision-making — signals an intention to be a different kind of body, not merely a renamed one.
The substance, though, lies in the reform programme that Qualifications Scotland has inherited and must now deliver. And that programme is ambitious in scope and extraordinarily long in timescale.
The reform timeline
The combined curriculum, qualifications, and assessment reform timeline, published by the Scottish Government in June 2025, maps a programme of change running through to 2032. The key milestones are worth stating plainly, because the distance between the current debate and the actual pace of reform is wider than most commentary acknowledges.
Assessment rebalancing — greater use of internal and continuous assessment contributing to final grades, reducing the dominance of terminal exams — begins in the first subjects from 2026. The draft evolved curriculum technical framework is due for publication in the summer of 2026. A significant preparation period runs from January 2027. The evolved technical framework is formally adopted in stages: Early to Third Level from August 2028, Fourth Level and beyond from August 2029. Reformed National 4 and National 5 qualifications aligned to the evolved curriculum arrive in 2031. Reformed Highers and Advanced Highers follow in 2032.
This is a seven-year programme. A pupil entering S1 in August 2026 will be in S6 before reformed Highers are available. A teacher beginning their career this year will have spent six years delivering qualifications that are, in their current form, understood to be in need of reform. This is not, in itself, a criticism — curriculum reform done badly or too quickly causes more damage than curriculum reform done slowly — but it does mean that the answer to the question 'has anything changed?' will, for most teachers, be 'not yet' for a considerable time.
The deeper question
The reform programme responds to two major reviews: Ken Muir's Putting Learners at the Centre (2022), which recommended the replacement of the SQA and the restructuring of Education Scotland, and Professor Louise Hayward's Independent Review of Qualifications and Assessment (2023), which argued for a shift away from high-stakes terminal examinations and toward a broader, more balanced assessment model. Both reviews diagnosed genuine problems. The senior phase in Scotland has become excessively exam-focused. The relationship between the Broad General Education and the Senior Phase is poorly articulated. Assessment drives curriculum rather than the other way round. Teachers spend too much of S4, S5, and S6 preparing pupils for exams rather than teaching them the subject.
These are real issues, and they matter. But the question that neither review — nor, so far, Qualifications Scotland itself — has answered with the specificity that schools need is this: what will the reformed qualifications actually look like in a classroom?
Consider the commitment to 'rebalancing' assessment. The principle is sound: less dependence on a single terminal exam, more recognition of what pupils demonstrate over the course of a year through internal and continuous assessment. But for a secondary teacher, the practical implications are immense. Who designs the internal assessments? Who moderates them to ensure consistency between schools? How are they quality-assured without creating a new bureaucratic burden that exceeds the one they replace? What happens to workload when teachers become not only the deliverers of the course but also, in effect, the examiners? And how do universities — whose admissions processes are built around the currency of exam grades — respond to qualifications whose grading includes a substantial internally assessed component?
Any new qualifications body will inherit the same question that plagues the current system: how do you measure attainment fairly when the instruments themselves are contested?
These are not objections to reform. They are the questions that determine whether reform works. And they are questions that can only be answered by understanding what happens in classrooms — what teachers do, how they assess, how they manage the relationship between teaching and examining, and what the effect of any change in assessment design will be on their daily practice.
Where observation fits
This is where the conversation about qualifications reform connects to a conversation that Scotland is not yet having about classroom practice. The Curriculum Improvement Cycle, now being led by Education Scotland, aims to 'declutter' the curriculum, clarify the role of knowledge, and improve progression from the BGE to the Senior Phase. These are the right priorities. But curriculum reform that proceeds without systematic evidence about what is currently happening in classrooms — how the existing curriculum is being taught, where the pressure points are, what teachers are doing in the gap between the intended curriculum and the enacted curriculum — risks producing guidance that is technically correct but practically disconnected from the reality of schools.
Qualifications Scotland's commitment to being 'closer to the classroom' is welcome precisely because this proximity is what was missing from the SQA. But proximity means more than a Schools Partnership Team and a headteacher secondment. It means understanding — in granular, evidence-based detail — what the experience of teaching and learning looks like in Scottish classrooms now, and designing qualifications that respond to that reality rather than to an idealised version of it.
The EEF's guidance on implementation (2019) makes a point that is directly relevant here: the impact of any educational change depends less on the quality of the intervention and more on the quality of the implementation. Scotland's qualification reform programme may be well designed at the policy level. But its success will be determined by what happens when it meets the classroom — when a teacher in a school in Fife or Falkirk or Fort William opens the reformed course specification and asks how does this change what I do on Monday? If the answer to that question has been developed in partnership with teachers who have been observed, listened to, and consulted in depth about their practice, the reform has a chance. If it has been developed primarily by policy teams and subject specialists working from curriculum documentation, the gap between intention and implementation will be as wide as it has been in previous reform efforts.
Reform or rebrand?
The honest answer, as of March 2026, is that it is too early to tell. Qualifications Scotland has the legislative framework, the governance structure, and the stated ambition to be genuinely different from the SQA. It also has a reform programme that is longer, more complex, and more dependent on classroom-level implementation than any previous qualification reform in Scotland's devolved history.
What will determine whether this is reform or rebrand is not the name on the letterhead or the composition of the board. It is whether the organisation builds a genuine understanding of what happens in classrooms and designs qualifications that work for the teachers who deliver them and the pupils who sit them. The SQA's reputation deteriorated not because it was badly intentioned but because it became, over time, an institution that felt remote from schools — that issued instructions downward rather than building understanding upward. If Qualifications Scotland repeats that pattern under a new name, then The Scotsman's scepticism will have been justified. If it does not — if it genuinely listens, observes, and designs with the classroom as its reference point — then the change of name may turn out to mark a genuine change of culture.
Six years is long enough to find out. But the work of finding out — of building the evidence base from classrooms, of understanding what the current system looks like in practice, of tracking whether reforms improve the experience of teaching and learning or merely rearrange its documentation — begins now.
Classroom-level evidence is what Learning Lens is built to aggregate; if that fits your reform or improvement work, book a conversation from the home page.
Jamie Scobie writes from extensive experience in Scottish secondary education, including pastoral care, data for improvement, and school self-evaluation. This blog is an independent publication: he writes in a personal capacity as the creator of Learning Lens, writing about classroom observation, teaching evidence, and education policy. He speaks here only for himself and for Learning Lens, not for any employer or other organisation. He holds an MSt from Cambridge (Distinction) and a Masters from Stirling.