FINGERNAILS are being chewed to the quick and university prospectuses nervously thumbed by teenagers across Scotland as they await their fate.
The future of thousands of youngsters hangs in the balance as exam papers across Scotland are being mark
ed. Come August, each student will find out if they have the grades to win a university or college place and pursue their chosen career.
However, it is not just pupils whose performance is under scrutiny.
Finally, four years since the concept of a new curriculum, details of both the nascent Curriculum for Excellence and the corresponding new exams system were published yesterday.
Standard and Intermediate grades will be replaced by new General and Advanced General grade exams.
Highers and Advanced Highers will remain, but undergo structural review to make sure they fit with both the new qualifications and curriculum.
Teachers and parents will be relishing the chance to cast their verdict on the Scottish Government's proposal to make the biggest changes to school education ever experienced in Scotland.
Curriculum for Excellence will overhaul the way children are taught and replace the existing guidelines for ages 5-14 with a broader curriculum covering children aged three up to 18.
Qualifications, and when they are taken, will change and even primary pupils will be taught differently, with more of an eye on how subjects such as maths are relevant to the real world.
In recent months teachers have raised the tenor of their demands to have their say, from a polite request, to a strident bellow.
Just last week members of Scotland's biggest teaching union, the EIS, passed a motion at their annual conference which called on the Scottish Government to ensure "full engagement with the teaching profession". Many were angry that they have not had the chance to input before now.
Delegates at the conference in Dundee described the current exams system as "confusing for children" and "bewildering for parents".
The proposed new system, published yesterday by the Scottish Government body, Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS), aims to rectify that.
Fiona Hyslop, the education secretary, launched the documents, saying Scottish education was about to enter its most dynamic phase in a generation. She described the plans as set to reform Scottish education, but deflected responsibility away from the Scottish Government.
She said: "Effective reform must come from local authorities taking ownership and working with schools, teachers and other partners.
"It is teachers and those working directly with young people who are best placed to meet the needs of individual learners and school leaders, and local authorities have a responsibility to provide support in helping them deliver."
David Raffe, director of education research at Edinburgh University who served on curriculum programme board, said the documents were particularly helpful in clarifying the distinction between S1-S3 and the qualifications phase beyond that.
He said: "It is important to maintain the momentum of Curriculum for Excellence in secondary schools and to ensure that the consultation on qualifications is appropriately informed."
However, teachers reiterated their concerns about the lack of resources, such as textbooks and training for teachers. Ronnie Smith, the general secretary of the EIS, urged teachers to contribute their views. He said: "There is an onus now on government to ensure the reality of this engagement and an onus on every teacher to reflect on, and respond to, the shape of the emerging curriculum for their own school and the pupils they teach.
"To succeed, the new curriculum also needs additional resources, especially human resources."
He also said the union still had concerns that the new compulsory S3 exams in literacy and numeracy would narrow the curriculum by focusing attention on such specific areas.
David Eaglesham, the general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers' Association, had his own warnings. He cautioned that there was a danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater by scrapping Standard grades. He said: "There is a danger that, after 12 years of study, pupils could end up with nothing."
He welcomed suggestions, in the consultation documents, that sought to find a way to acknowledge the efforts of youngsters who fail the new General grade.
He said: "Currently, there may be pupils who put in for the credit and general levels of Standard grade exams, have a bad day in the exam and end up with nothing. Anything that says a qualification is not a pass is not worth the paper it is written on. There would need to be a clearer indication that the pupil had achieved something."
David Cameron, the children's director of Stirling Council, said he considered the documents to be helpful.
He had previously warned parents would need to be brought in on consultation, or they would feel that their children were guinea pigs.
At last, teachers and parents have received their wish for more information, even if further problems with the LTS website meant many could not read the documents yesterday.
In two months' time, teenagers across Scotland will find out their fate from the exams they sat last month.
Public consultation on the future of those qualifications is expected to run to the end of October.
But it will take far longer for the final verdict on the new curriculum to emerge. And it may only be in five to six years, when the first cohort of General exam candidates walk into the exam hall, that we find out for sure.
