Without Qualification

The Scottish Qualifications Authority has not published the formula by which it calculated today's grades by taking account of the past performance of the pupil and that of the school.

Yet by that means has it downgraded 124,000 predictions by teachers who had already tended to underpredict the performance of the poor, the black and the male.

The only appeal is back to the SQA, and in any case both aspects of its method, the past performance of the pupil and the past performance of the school, are uncoded ways of saying "middle-class and above".

Nicola Sturgeon from Irvine, the daughter of an electrician and a dental nurse, would not have been given the five As to read Law at Glasgow.

This ought to be the lead item on every news bulletin, a scandal across Europe, and a story on the front page of The New York Times.