Hansard

I am pleased to provide this statement to Parliament to update it on the setting of local stretch aims for raising attainment and closing the poverty-related attainment gap.

At the outset, I thank all local authorities for approaching the new requirement as part of the Scottish attainment challenge with commitment and rigour.

The Government is absolutely committed to closing the poverty-related attainment gap. Since its launch in 2015, the Scottish attainment challenge has been a key part of our strategy to do that. We know that it has had a positive impact on children and young people. Our evaluation shows that almost nine out of 10 headteachers who responded reported improvements in closing the poverty-related gap in attainment and/or health and wellbeing as a result of Scottish attainment challenge-funded approaches.

To build on the progress that has been made to date and in response to the impact that the pandemic has had on children and young people—particularly those impacted by poverty—I have taken the opportunity to make some fundamental changes to the Scottish attainment challenge. Key among those changes is a new mission for the Scottish attainment challenge that focuses squarely on outcomes for children and young people: to use education to improve outcomes for children and young people impacted by poverty, with a focus on tackling the poverty-related attainment gap.

I do not expect teachers to achieve that on their own. Schools and education services must collaborate across services and local partners to make progress.

That approach recognises that every local authority has a part to play. From the £1 billion investment in the Scottish attainment challenge over the course of this parliamentary session, we are now distributing strategic equity funding to all 32 local authorities. I know that that was welcomed by the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. That comes alongside continued investment of more than £130 million per year in pupil equity funding, which goes directly to schools, and continued funding to support the educational outcomes of care-experienced children and young people.

Alongside that significant investment, Education Scotland continues to provide local authorities and schools with a range of support. That includes a new approach that involves working with local authorities to agree a model of universal, targeted and intensive support. In addition, Education Scotland’s range of published resources includes the new “Scotland’s Equity Toolkit: supporting recovery and accelerating progress”, which draws together in one place the range of resources, research and learning from the Scottish attainment challenge.

Earlier this year, we published the framework for recovery and accelerating progress, which made clear the respective roles and responsibilities, and introduced local stretch aims, for closing the poverty-related attainment gap. I will now focus on those local stretch aims.

We know that a from-the-ground-up approach works best in embedding improvement. Therefore, the stretch aims have been developed by local authorities using local knowledge, data and expertise, and they express each local authority’s ambitions for learning and its learners. Local authorities operate in a range of different contexts and have different starting points for that work. At the same time, I am committed to the importance of ensuring that every child and young person has the same opportunities through their education, wherever they live in Scotland.

Through the range of analyses of the Scottish attainment challenge, we know that we are making progress, but we need to progress more quickly. A key element of the progress that has been made to date is a change in the culture and ethos across the education system, which has raised the profile of equity in education. Through the refreshed mission of the Scottish attainment challenge and the introduction of local stretch aims, we have shifted our focus towards outcomes for our children and young people who are impacted by poverty. Key to improving those outcomes is the work done in local systems with schools, third sector organisations and other local services.

Further, by introducing a requirement for local stretch aims, we also seek to ensure clear local ownership of progress towards the overall mission of the Scottish attainment challenge; drive a greater transparency around data for improvement, creating opportunities for learning and partnership working; and help to address unwarranted variation between local authorities in attainment and progress in closing the poverty-related attainment gap.

With consistency and flexibility in mind, the requirements for stretch aims involve a core plus model. The core aims are a sub-set of the existing 11 national improvement framework measures of the poverty-related attainment gap. They include aims for literacy and numeracy in the broad general education phase and in the senior phase at Scottish credit and qualifications framework levels 5 and 6; sustained positive destinations through the annual participation measure; and a locally identified measure for health and wellbeing.

Alongside those core aims, for which all local authorities must set stretch aims, the “plus” element of the model enables local authorities to set aims for their own local improvement priorities. To be clear, the stretch aims are locally identified and determined by councils. Councils have undertaken rigorous local processes to set them and will work with schools to meet them, keeping in mind the local context, the continuing impact of Covid and the increasing impact of the cost of living crisis.

Collectively, the core stretch aims set by local authorities show a great deal of ambition for recovery and accelerating progress. Aggregated, they represent local ambitions for improvement on 2020-21, which was the last year of published data when the requirement was introduced, and 2018-19, which is the last year of pre-pandemic data. I welcome that level of ambition. However, I also know that, ultimately, what matters is the implementation of the plans, supported through strategic equity funding, that underpin the stretch aims and the progress made locally throughout the academic year.

For overall attainment and for closing the poverty-related attainment gap in literacy and numeracy in primary schools, the collective stretch aims of local authorities amount to working towards achieving the biggest two-year improvement recorded since the introduction of the challenge. If the stretch aims for literacy and numeracy are achieved in full and that rate of progress continues, we will be on track to substantially eliminate the poverty-related attainment gap in primary schools, which is where the Scottish attainment challenge started. Given the effect of Covid-19 on children and young peoples’ achievement of curriculum for excellence levels in 2020-21, the aims represent significant local ambition for recovery back to and beyond the national position pre-pandemic.

For the senior phase, we asked local authorities to set stretch aims for SCQF levels 5 and 6. In contrast to the dip in achievement of curriculum for excellence levels—ACEL—attainment as a result of the pandemic, the changes to approaches to certification played a part in record levels of attainment in the senior phase in 2020-21. Therefore, I welcome local authorities’ aims to sustain or exceed the levels of attainment that were achieved in 2020-21.

In terms of the annual participation measure, which helps us to understand outcomes for young people, local authorities have set aims to improve on the already high 92.2 per cent in 2020-21 to 93.4 per cent in 2022-23, and to narrow the poverty-related gap by 1.2 percentage points. In terms of the range of health and wellbeing aims and the plus aims, which reflect local authorities’ various local priorities, there is a wide range of different aims for progress this year.

Those include aims for improved attendance and participation; aims that break down the component parts of some specific core aims—for example, focusing on the elements of reading, writing, listening and talking—aims for care-experienced children and young people; and aims that span the full learner journey. There are aims for early years and some that capture the full range of achievements of children and young people in the senior phase, including foundation apprenticeships and a focus on learner pathways.

What matters now is local progress towards those stretch aims.

Detailed questions on the ambitions of individual local authorities for their children and young people are for local authorities themselves to address. The impact of the pandemic—and now the impact of the current cost crisis—means the moral imperative to support our children and young people who have been most impacted by poverty to achieve to their full potential is stronger than ever. In that difficult context, we remain absolutely focused on our children and young people.

That is why, alongside the £1 billion investment in the Scottish attainment challenge, the Government is supporting children and young people in numerous ways. We are tackling the cost of the school day through the expansion of free school meals and continued investment in the school clothing grant. Teacher numbers are currently the highest that they have been since 2008, with the number of primary teachers the highest since 1980; and we have delivered the highest education spend among the United Kingdom nations, and more teachers per pupil than any other UK nation, while also protecting free tuition in higher education.

We are also listening to children and young people, parents, carers and professionals through the national discussion and our reform agenda, and we are delivering on the national mission to tackle child poverty through measures such as our increased Scottish child payment—a key benefit that is unavailable anywhere else in the UK and which is projected to lift 50,000 children out of poverty next year.

Taken together, those measures demonstrate the Government’s commitment to making Scotland the best place in the world to grow up. We will continue to work together with our local government partners to deliver on our shared mission to improve outcomes for children and young people.