Erin can’t forget the moment she opened her exam results in August 2020.
She’d been studying for six Highers and after getting A grades at prelim, was hoping to study veterinary medicine.
“I remember being quite excited,” she said. “I didn’t think anything was going to go wrong. I thought I’d set myself up really well.”
Then the postman arrived and Erin remembers opening the envelope, receiving three Bs, one C and two Ds.
“My legs buckled beneath me, I remember feeling I just couldn’t believe this had happened,” she said.
“It did not reflect anything that I’d done over the last two years.”
Erin had never failed a class in her life. She said: “I was crying uncontrollably. I remember my mum just didn’t know what to do and my dad came home from work early. It was a horrible experience.”
The story was repeated on social media and among her school friends.
She said: “I remember thinking, something’s not right here. All of my friends and people I know that wanted to do medicine weren’t getting the grades that they got in their prelims.”
Erin organised a Facebook page and set up a protest in Glasgow’s George Square.
“It felt like my full life had disappeared in front of me. And when I started reading into it, I realised it wasn’t anything to do with me. It was bigger, systematic inequality.”
She added: “I’d read about the algorithm they used, I didn’t know too much about it at the time but I just knew it wasn’t right the way we’d been treated and that it was pupils from deprived communities that had been disadvantaged with the marking.”
