A teaching union leader has warned of “some pretty dodgy practices in schools” over exams.

Kevin Campbell, the new leader of the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association or SSTA, claims pressure for results is prompting colleagues to pass children who are not performing.

Mr Campbell also claimed some pupils were repeating tests, especially those assessed in school rather than independently, until they passed them.

His remarks come amid growing political controversy about standards after years of successive reform of exams.

Mr Campbell was making specific claims children who should be doing National 3 tests and course work - the equivalent of an old foundation level standard grade or Access 3 qualification - were being pushed to do a National 4 instead.

National 4s are - broadly - equivalent to Lowers, O’Grades or Standard Grades usually sat at the end of fourth year.

Mr Campbell said: “Where are all those kids who were doing Access 3? They are all being forced in to National 4 classes and pressure is being brought to bear on teachers to just pass them.”

Referring to National 4s, he added: “There is constant pressure ‘nobody can fail, nobody can fail, nobody can fail’ and they ar e put back until you can get them through that and that leads to some pretty dodgy practices.”

Mr Campbell, who became the president of SSTA, Scotland’s second biggest teaching union, last month, was speaking to the Times Educational Supplement Scotland (TESS)

Figures from the SQA, Scotland’s exam quango, confirm a drop in entries at the National 3 level. There were 18,596 entries for the qualifications in 2016, compared with 33,402 for Access 3 in 2013, the last full year under the old system.

The SQA disputed Mr Campbell’s claims of pressure. A spokesman said the body relies “on the professionalism of teachers, as schools and colleges undertake their own internal verification processes”.

It said officials offered support to teachers on how to check they were correctly assessing young people.

Mr Campbell, 42, from Easterhouse in Glasgow, was a late entry in to his profession after being excluded from his Glasgow school for truancy and leaving with no qualifications at all. The son of a postman and Co-Op worker, he then did a succession of unskilled jobs.

When he did get a job as a teacher - at age 27 following an HNC, a degree from Glasgow Caledonian and an English teaching course - he was told to tone down his working class accent. He declined, saying it helps him connect with deprived young people.

He said: “Working-class kids are always going to identify more and, therefore, listen to a teacher who obviously comes from the same place in society as they do.”

Now Mr Campbell says his job is not just to turn out young people with test marks but “decent human beings”.

The biology teacher at Levenmouth Academy in Fife - a new-build - claimed his school suffered from “zilch” resources and a lack of teachers.

He told TESS: “In science we have no money for equipment, so we are in state-of-the-art labs but we are using physics and chemistry equipment from the 1980s and 1970s. That is the reality for me as a teacher.”

Levenmouth, in a deprived area, only opened in August but Mr Campbell is determined to use his new post to raise concerns about school resources at a national level.