Bid to close attainment gap is doomed to fail, say half of school heads

NEARLY half of headteachers have warned that the SNP’s bid to narrow the pupil attainment gap is not ‘sustainable’.

Some said extra cash from the Scottish Government’s dedicated fund for narrowing the gulf between the best and worst-performing schools had been spent on staff.

They fear that when the money runs out, staff numbers will have to be cut – creating a major setback for the flagship project.

Education Secretary ShirleyAnne Somerville admitted yesterday the Scottish Government needs to ‘increase the speed and scale’ of school reforms.

The warning comes after ministers were accused of backtracking on Nicola Sturgeon’s pledge to ‘substantially’ close the attainment gap by 2026.

Earlier this week, it emerged that almost £2million set aside to help the poorest pupils do better in class had been spent on covering the wages of ‘campus cops’ – police officers based in schools.

Last night, Scottish Tory education spokesman Oliver Mundell said: ‘The SNP insist that closing the attainment gap is their top priority but we now know they have shamefully abandoned their target to close it.

‘The stark findings from the headteacher survey should be a wake-up call for the SNP Education Secretary. Those in our schools are clearly concerned that flagship funding is not being distributed in the right way by the SNP. Only this week we found out that money from that pupil equity fund has, astonishingly, been diverted to pay for campus cops.’

The findings appear in a survey of headteachers by the

Scottish Government looking at schools in receipt of Attainment Scotland Fund money.

It found that ‘more than half (54 per cent) of survey respondents felt that progress to date in closing the poverty-related attainment gap would be sustainable’.

But of the remainder who said progress in closing the gap would not be sustainable, 76 per cent pointed to a ‘loss of staffing and skills’.

The research covered the school year 2020-21, including a period from January to March 2021 when most schools across Scotland were closed because of the pandemic.

One headteacher in an urban school said that all of its special funding for tackling the attainment gap had been spent on staffing.

But they added: ‘When this additionality is withdrawn and we lose this staffing, there will be no way we can keep this commitment in place.’

The report found that ‘for schools that have not seen any improvement in closing the poverty-related attainment gap, comments most commonly referred to the adverse impact of the Covid-19 pandemic’.

‘Diverted to pay for campus cops’