Around 145,000 Scottish high schoolers are expecting to pick up SQA exam results today but for some the situation was made more stressful by an electronic distribution fault.

More than 7,000 pupils awaiting their results woke up to blank emails from SQA, the Scottish exam authority, who insisted they were urgently trying to resolve the issue.

From 8am on Tuesday, students could receive their results by post and anyone who has signed up to a MySQA account could opt to receive them by email and text message.

Concerned parents immediately began flooding the SQA helpline when email templates were being sent out with blank space where they would normally contain results data.

The SQA says that as many as 58,000 students had signed up to be notified of their grades by email and SMS in addition to receiving their results by post.

Scottish Conservative shadow cabinet secretary for education Liam Kerr MSP said, “This chaotic and shambolic situation is the last thing pupils across Scotland needed on results day.

“Receiving a blank email will have only added to pupils worries about how they did in their exams.”

Kerr pointed the finger at successive SNP education secretaries who “dithered and delayed on reforming the SQA for too long”.

He demanded the exam authority take swift action to rectify their mistake, saying: “Those in charge at the SQA must urgently be upfront as to why many students have failed to receive their results as they expected to and ensure these errors are rectified as soon as possible for all those affected.”

The Scottish Qualifications Authority has since said they have resolved the issue with the “vast majority of learners” receiving their results as expected.

SQA Chief Executive, Fiona Robertson, said Scottish students have received a “solid set of results”, despite the number achieving passing grades falling short of what students achieved last year.

Despite the dip, she urged caution in comparing results with previous years.

2024 was a record year for vocational Students received grades for a wide range of qualifications including vocational awards, with a 24% increase in vocational and technical qualification awards seeing a total of 90,045 such qualifications awarded.

Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth said also that the recovery from the pandemic would have “contributed to some of the variability we have seen in results this year”.

She added: “I’m really heartened to see a record high 90,045 vocational or technical qualifications have been awarded this year, up almost a quarter on 2023’s results.”