I’m fuming about the SQA results and I’ve made it known on here. I think I’m even more angry with the people who claim to hold traditional Labour values but are “now SNP” because Labour left them. What follows is a long thread about me and why this debacle is so awful.

I’m 42 now, and I’ve done well for myself but I spent my high school years living above a pub in a Renfrew tenement. Our close was used as a toilet (not just a urinal) and somewhere to sleep the effects of alcohol off by the pub patrons.

Even at age 10 it wasn’t unusual for me to come home from school and step over a urine soaked unconscious alcoholic to get up the stairs. I think that probably puts us quite far down the SIMD levels. I didn’t start life here, my first 8 years were in a 3 bed Semi in Bishopbriggs.

When my parents split my mum, my 6 yo brother and I moved to a similar but rented 3 bed semi in Duntocher. Mum decided when I was 10 that she wanted to take the small amount of equity she’d got from the eventual sale of the Bishopbriggs house and buy again.

This is important, we may have ended up poor, stepping over alcoholics but we’d been middle class, mum had middle class values and importantly middle class capital. She quickly realised that the primary school we were in the catchment for has barely moved on since Victorian times

Before we’d started she tried to get us into a close by primary with demographics that reflected where we’d come from not where we were now. She was told that her sons would have “little in common with their classmates”.

It was for the best that my brother and I learned to get along with our new peers. That translates as “you’re poor now, we don’t want to risk your children dragging us down”. At age 10 and 8 it was already decided my brother and I would be less successful because of our postcode.

It was at this time the interest rates shot to 15%. Mum’s mortgage payments tripled. There was no money for anything but the mortgage and bills. We were in the only bought flat out of hundreds around us, most of the rest being council. She was financially crippled.

She applied for a council house so we could live like those peers that our local authority had advised us to do. There weren’t any and as we weren’t homeless we never came up the list. We probably ended up as some of the poorest people in our area because of accommodation costs.

Another memory of that time was mum snapping because I was crying as I wanted a glass of juice. There wasn’t any, there hadn’t been any for over a week and there wouldn’t be any for another week. It was water or nothing. We were a proper basics family.

Let’s jump forward to 3rd year of high school. By now mum had a job as a karaoke and pub quiz host. We were still in the flat and in the evenings mum paid the neighbour a wee bit of cash to look after us. Unfortunately the neighbour was a functioning and secret alcoholic.

At about this time she ceased to be functioning or secretive. Mum had no choice but to leave 13yo me in charge of my 11yo brother, there was no-one else. There were people at first but the help dropped off as it always will.

Part of my new responsibilities were helping write the pub quizzes. This was the early 90’s, pre google remember. It involved creating 50-80 question quizzes from a myriad of resources in the house. Mum was in 5 or 6 pubs a week. We couldn’t just do 1 a week though.

People who do quizzes travel, she had people regularly turn up in 2 or 3 different pubs. We averaged about 200 new questions a week. That’s time consuming, that’s homework time right there and that’s how this leads back to school.

We were being streamed into our Standard Grade (SG) classes at this time. Policy at our school was only the highest achievers were allowed to attempt the Credit paper. Because I wasn’t completing homework I was put in a General class for Maths.

For those that don’t know SG had 3 papers. Foundation, General and Credit. Everyone sat General and either Foundation or Credit. They were scored 1-7. 1-2 was a Credit pass, 3-4 General pass, 5-6 Foundation pass and 7 was a fail.

If you haven’t worked it out already everyone knew that 1-3 was an actual pass and everything else was a fail. I was only going to be allowed to sit the General and Foundation papers. My school decided then and there I was only going to be allowed a basic pass in maths.

They weren’t going to let me attempt anything better. There was never any question that I would pass the General paper. I didn’t need the Foundation safety net but I’d been written off because I was the poor kid with holey shoes and holey trousers with no time to do homework.

I got my 3 in maths by the way, comfortably. Higher maths was only for those that got a 2 or above though. I wasn’t allowed to even try that. I was allowed to try Higher physics and Higher Tech Studies. These are *very* maths based though so without the Higher maths I struggled.

I eventually left school with one Higher at B in English. For years I thought that was me but then I started a BA(Hons) in Youth Work with @OpenUniversity about 15 years after leaving school.

I graduated a few years ago with a 2:1 having supported my mum through 2 years of cancer treatment, gone through the bereavement process when she died, become a father and deployed all over the world with the RAF. Taking exams in Estonia amongst other things.

I’m obviously not stupid and obviously capable but the school and exam systems were stacked against me because I was poor from the age of 10. I’m lucky, I had a mum that knew different and helped where she could. That’s why I’m doing alright now.

That’s why the deliberate holding down of poor young people has angered me so much. If you’re a believer in “progressive politics” (what does that even mean by the way?) but have a Pavlovian response to protect the SNP in this by saying “but pass rates are up” you’re lying.

You’re lying to yourself and others. There’s nothing progressive about knocking a poor person down just because they’re poor. The exam system and school system is still flawed (though less so than when I was a boy) the SQA and SNP doubled down on that when they didn’t have to.

They took a system designed by the middle classes for the middle classes and protected those middle classes even more. To throw poor young people under the bus they way they have is a disgrace and those that support them in it are showing us who they really are.

All people want is for poor kids to have *the same* opportunities, that’s it. That threatens the nice middle class existences of our SNP MSPs and that’s why we are where we are today. If you’ve got this far then we’ll done and thanks for reading.