Education

The Scottish Government was making limited progress in tackling the attainment gap even before the pandemic undermined education at all levels

Despite staking its reputation on tackling the attainment gap, the Scottish Government is barely scraping a pass

In 2015, less than a year into her tenure as first minister, Nicola Sturgeon urged voters to judge her on her government's education record.

Specifically, Sturgeon pledged to tackle Scotland's attainment gap, the yawning divide between those from the most deprived areas and their more affluent peers.

The First Minister deserves credit for staking her reputation on an issue which had proved so intractable in the past, a problem so deep-seated that a succession of well-intentioned policy initiatives made little impact.

Yet if we are to judge the Scottish Government's education record solely on reducing the attainment gap, then it barely scrapes a pass.

While it's true the gap has narrowed, progress has been limited.

According to the Scottish Government's own statistics, the attainment gap in literacy for P1, P4 and P7 pupils combined has reduced from 22.1 percentage points in 2016/17 to 20.7 percentage points in 2018/19.

For numeracy, there is a gap of 16.8 points, down from 17.6 points in 2016/17.

Across all three age groups, the Scottish Government says the gap has narrowed because the proportion of pupils achieving the expected lit-eracy and numeracy levels has increased slightly more for pupils from the most deprived areas than those from more affluent areas.

But Lindsay Paterson, a professor of education policy at Edinburgh University, says the gap is narrowing because those from more affluent areas are going backwards.

"Inequality has got lower not because the least advantaged pupils are getting better, it's because the most advantaged pupils are sinking: he says. "On average, Scotland just stagnate° TOE use idw. 10 years. But for the most advantaged students, we've actually gone backwards!"

For pupils in the third year of secondary school, performance in literacy barely changed between 2016/17 and 2018/19, with the attainment gap actually increasing from 13.6 points to 13.8 points during that period. In numeracy, the gap reduced from 14.9pts to 13.5pts.

Paterson thinks the situation will eventually lead to "political trouble" for the SNP, which has, after all, asked to be judged on this very issue.

It doesn't seem to be consistent with the princi-ples of equal opportunities and all the other things that underpin comprehensive education that you get more equality by bringing down the best pupils rather than raising the lowest," Paterson says.

And while the constitution has dominated Scottish politics for much of the past five years, education remains one of the issues likely to cut through with the electorate.

Indeed, a recent poll by Ipsos MORI found edu-cation to be the second-most important issue for voters, second only to another independence referendum, but ahead of both the NHS and the pandemic.

To further compound matters, the early indica-tions are that enforced school closures as a result of COVID are likely to hit hardest those from the poorest backgrounds, those children who need the structure and educational support of the classroom the most.

Researchers at the London School of Economics (LSE) have found that school closures are likely to exacerbate educational inequalities, with