Music has largest proportion of top grades at Scottish Advanced Highers level

Data published on Tuesday morning reveals that Music has the largest proportion of grade A results at Advanced Highers level when compared to all other subjects.

Exam results have been released for National 2-5s, Highers, Advanced Highers, the Scottish Baccalaureate, and Skills for Work qualifications. 

The breakdown of results shows that 55.3 per cent of the 1,755 students who took an Advanced Higher in Music achieved a grade A - the highest mark available. 

Music’s pass rate was also comparatively high, with 92.8 per cent of students achieving grades A to C.

Sixth most popular subject

Advanced Highers are Scotland’s SCQF level 7 qualifications for students in the sixth year of secondary school. They come after Highers and before Higher National Diplomas (level 8) or degrees (level 9).

Straight Music was the sixth most popular subject taken at Advanced Higher level this year, accounting for 6.21 per cent of the overall entries. Maths, English, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics were the only subjects with more entries than Music.

In Scotland, students usually study four or five Highers in the fifth year of secondary school (S5). Depending on their results at the end of this year, they can go on to study additional Highers or Advanced Highers in S6.

Students also took Music Technology and Music: Portfolio - figures for these music courses are recorded separately.

National 5s

At National 5 level (equivalent to GCSE in England), 93 per cent of 7,675 students achieved grades A to C in Music, bringing the pass rate back down to pre-pandemic levels.

In 2019, the last year exams were held, 94 per cent of students passed Music, while this rose to around 97 per cent in 2020 and 2021.

Highers

A similar trend can be found at Higher level (equivalent to A Level in England) for Music, with a 2022 pass rate of 94.3 per cent compared to 92 per cent in 2019, 98 per cent in 2020, and 97.4 per cent in 2021.

This pattern in Music reflects a wider trend across all subjects, with record-high results of the last two years falling back down to 2019 levels. 

The Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) said that the ‘significantly different circumstances’ in which grades were awarded since 2019 do not allow for ‘meaningful comparison’, although acknowledges that this year’s cohort has achieved ‘one of the strongest’ performances to date in an exam year.

Scotland’s education secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville described this year’s results ‘particularly impressive’ given the ongoing disruptions caused by the pandemic, highlighting that a ‘wide-ranging’ package of support and modifications was put in place for exams this year.

At the end of 2021, the Scottish government announced that £12m would be included in the budget to remove instrumental tuition fees in schools. 

Read the provisional attainment statistics for 2022.