Hansard

In addition to the local authority-based approach, 57 schools have been identified and, beyond that, there are many sources of intervention in the lives of individual families and communities. Those things are recognition of the fact that there are many solutions to the problem. I strongly defend the major intervention that the attainment fund represents.

The focus has been on primary schools, because we know how important early preventative work is in improving children’s longer-term outcomes. Some 54,000 children in more than 300 schools in our most deprived communities have benefited from the funding.

Local authorities and schools have worked hard to put in place approaches that will really make a difference and which are based on evidence of what works. They have thought long and hard about their schoolchildren and how the funding can support them. The result is targeted and focused work on literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing within and beyond the school. Alongside teachers, there are family link workers, speech and language therapists and community learning workers who are paid for by the attainment fund. Alongside that there is work to develop programmes and approaches to close the equity gap.

The pupil-premium approach that is in place in England and Wales, which some members seem to recommend, is yet to be shown to have had an impact. The June 2015 National Audit Office report concluded that it was too early for the impact to be known. It also concluded that per-pupil funding had fallen in real terms in 45 per cent of schools between 2011-12 and 2014-15, with funding for the 16 per cent most disadvantaged secondary schools having fallen by more than 5 per cent over the same period, despite the introduction of the pupil premium.

In Scotland, our average per-pupil spending in 2014-15 for both primary and secondary education was higher than spending in England. The attainment Scotland fund will provide additional funding to the children and communities who face some of the greatest challenges. We will continue to do that.

It is clear that where there are large concentrations of children who are living in deprived communities, there is a greater need for support. Our approach delivers that. We will continue to review how we target funding to ensure that we reach the children and young people whose outcomes are impacted greatly by living in poverty.

Although our focus is on schools where there are high concentrations of children living in deprived communities, we are also aware of the need for universal support to close the attainment gap. We have enhanced the support that is already available by putting an attainment adviser in place for every authority and by developing the national improvement framework, the primary 1 to 3 read, write, count campaign and the making maths count programme.

We must not lose sight of the fact that success is elusive for a small number of our children—and for a significant number of our children from deprived communities. The gap in attainment is narrowing, but if we are to achieve our ambition of delivering a world-class education system for all our children, we must and will do more. Our approach to targeted funding through the attainment Scotland fund is, I believe, clear evidence of our determination to achieve just that.

I move, as an amendment to motion S4M-15430 in the name of Liam McArthur, to leave out from “the introduction of” to end and insert:

“the £100 million Attainment Scotland Fund, which is additional to the almost £5 billion invested in education every year through local authorities, is rightly targeted at the primary schools that serve the most deprived communities in Scotland, with over 300 primary schools, which together support 54,399 pupils from deprived backgrounds, 64% of the total number of such pupils, benefitting from the funding; notes that this funding is providing a wide range of support to close the attainment gap including additional teaching and other specialist staff, support for parents to engage in their children’s learning, literacy and numeracy tools and extra training for teachers; further believes that the package of universal support that has been drawn together through the Scottish Attainment Challenge, including the appointment of attainment advisors for every local authority, the introduction of the Attainment Challenge Innovation Fund and the continued progress of the Raising Attainment for All programme will help ensure that there is support for every local authority to close the poverty-related attainment gap; recognises that the Scottish Government will continue to work with key stakeholders to explore and consider further approaches that will support schools to close the attainment gap, and acknowledges that the OECD’s review of Scottish education recognised the Scottish Government’s determination to focus on achieving both excellence and equity in the education system and that the national improvement framework has the potential to be a key means of driving work to close the attainment gap and strengthen formative assessment approaches.”