Purpose

Summary of Appeals Outcomes presents a summary of appeals outcomes for National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher courses.

Status

These statistics are classified as information.

Description

Summary of Appeal Outcomes presents data on appeals for National Qualifications; for example, Appeals 2025 data covers the academic year from 2024 to 2025. It includes data for previous years (where available), detailing the number of appeal requests and a breakdown of resulting changes.

The figures are produced by independent statistical staff in accordance with the Code of Practice for Statistics.

Appeals Service and awarding arrangements

The purpose of the Appeals Service is to provide learners and centres with the opportunity to request a review of the grade they were awarded for an SQA National Course. If a learner did not achieve the expected result for the externally assessed components of their course, they can submit an appeal or ask their centre to do this on their behalf.

The operation of our appeals system varied fundamentally between 2019 and 2024 due to the alternative awarding arrangements that were in place to account for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Further details of the awarding arrangements are given in methodology reports published on SQA’s website:

In 2025, SQA returned to well-established awarding procedures, in line with our Awarding and Grading for National Courses Policy.

Appeals 2023 - 2025

In this period, the purpose of Appeals was to provide learners and centres with the opportunity to review an SQA National Course grade whenever a learner had not achieved the expected result for the SQA-marked assessment components of their course. From 2023, the process involved a marking review of a learner’s externally-assessed components and checked that:

  • all parts of the assessment have been marked
  • the marking is in line with the national standards
  • the marks given for each answer have been totalled correctly
  • the correct result has been entered into the system

Learners, their representatives or their centres could submit appeals. As grades can go up, down or stay the same, learners had to consent to the appeal before any requests could be submitted by their centre or representative.

Appeals could be prioritised if the learner had a conditional place at college or university, or for training or employment that depended on their grade.

Learners can apply for an appeal if they have been awarded a final grade based on externally-assessed components that were submitted to SQA for marking.

Learners were not able to submit an appeal in the following circumstances:

  • If a course award has been cancelled as a penalty due to serious candidate malpractice.
  • If a learner has been certificated at grade A. A marking review is designed to address situations where the certificated grade result needs to be reviewed and there is no grade higher than an A. An exception to this rule is where a learner has a conditional offer from university that requires a band A1. These requests should be submitted via the learner’s centre who must then notify SQA of band 1 requests at submission.
  • If the course was National 5 Practical Electronics, National 5 Practical Metalworking or National 5 Practical Woodworking in 2023 as these courses were wholly internally assessed in 2023 and were not eligible for appeals.
  • If an award was reached using the Examination Exceptional Circumstances Consideration Service. In these cases, a full review of all learner materials will have been undertaken by SQA senior appointees before certification.

Source of data

Appeals data are collected when the Appeals Service processing is nearly complete, aligned with the post-Appeals certification run for December final results. The data are collected within the same processing window in November each year to aid year-on-year comparisons.

Methodology

Data processing for the publication takes place using R software within a reproducible analytical pipeline (RAP). Total entries and number of appeals are calculated following data pre-processing. The appeals rate is calculated by expressing the number of appeals as a percentage of the number of entries. The number of appeals is calculated for each outcome: no change, upgrade, and downgrade. Appeal outcome rates are also calculated by expressing the number of upgraded, downgraded and no change appeals as a percentage of all appeals.

National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher attainment is reported from grades A to D, with No Awards (includes results of 8, 9, missing, and E) reported separately.

Chi Square tests are carried out to determine whether appeal request rates are significantly and statistically different (at p < 0.05) by sex (between female and male), centre type (between all centre types) and SIMD (between SIMD 1 and SIMD 5). Additional chi square tests are carried out to determine whether appeal outcomes are significantly and statistically different (at p < 0.05) by sex (between female and male), centre type (all centre types excluding Other) and SIMD (between all SIMD categories).

Terms used

  • ‘Entries’ refers to the number of entries reported in Provisional Attainment Statistics 2025.
  • ‘Upgrade’ refers to an appeal request that resulted in a candidate receiving a higher grade.
  • ‘Downgrade’ refers to an appeal request that resulted in a candidate receiving a lower grade.
  • ‘No Change’ refers to an appeal request that did not result in a change to the grade awarded to the candidate.
  • ‘Upgrade/Downgrade/No Change rate’ refers to the respective outcomes as a proportion of appeal requests.
  • ‘Appeal rate’ refers to the number of appeals as a proportion of applicable entries.
  • In some cases, centre type categories are used in these statistics and result from the grouping of some related centre types. ‘Education Authority - Secondary School’ and ‘Education Authority - Special School’ are grouped as ‘Education Authority’. ‘Independent - Secondary School’ and ‘Independent - Special School’ are grouped as ‘Independent’. ‘Further Education College’ is reported as ‘FE College’. All remaining centre types, including training providers, voluntary sector organisations, HM Armed Forces, prisons and primary schools are reported as ‘Other’.
  • The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) is a relative measure of multiple deprivation which considers income, resources and opportunities to rank small geographical units (datazones) of roughly equal population size in terms of deprivation. SIMD quintiles split the datazones (geographical units) into five groups, each containing 20% of Scotland’s datazones. SIMD 1 contains the 20% most deprived datazones and SIMD 5 contains the 20% least deprived datazones. Alternatively, SIMD deciles split the datazones into 10 groups.
  • Chi Square tests are statistical tests that examine the differences between groups and determine whether any differences are greater than would be expected by chance.

Confidentiality and rounding

  • All figures are rounded to the nearest five. Totals are also rounded, and this may cause the sum of rounded figures to differ from the total reported. Entry numbers between one and four inclusive have been suppressed to protect against the risk of disclosing personal information. Suppressed figures are marked up with the shorthand ‘[c]’ in tables and ‘fewer than five’ in text.

  • Percentages are calculated using figures prior to rounding. Percentages with a value greater than zero and less than 0.05% are marked up with the shorthand ‘[low]’ in tables and ‘less than 0.05%’ in text.

Limitations

FE colleges have relatively low uptake for graded National Qualifications. The range of subjects taken in FE colleges is also considerably narrower than that of the education authority and independent centre types in this release. For these reasons, overall appeals information for FE colleges is more variable over time.

‘Other’ centre type have relatively low uptake for graded National Qualifications. The range of subjects taken in ‘Other’ centre type is also considerably narrower than that of the education authority and independent centre types in this release. For these reasons, appeals information for ‘Other’ centre type is more variable over time.

The operation of an appeals system has varied fundamentally over the past five years due to the alternative awarding arrangements that were in place to account for the COVID19 pandemic. As such, historic Appeals data outwith this publication should not be compared without full consideration of this essential contextual information.

Information Governance

The data in this publication is defined as being statistical for the purposes of information governance and data protection. This primarily means that the associated processing is not carried out for the purposes of measures or decisions with respect to a particular data subject. Further information on this processing category can be found in the appropriate data protection legislation.

Revisions and corrections

Once published these statistics are not usually subject to revisions. Further information about revisions and corrections is available in our policy document.

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