Time to use the Pupil Equity Fund

REBECCA Mcquillan’s perceptive and welcome column (“Home schooling will make education more unequal”, The Herald, April 3) raised important questions about the effect of current circumstances on the attainment gap. It is surely reasonable to suggest, as she does, that, deprived of normal state schooling, many of our youngsters will fall even further behind their advantaged peers.

While the Government is rightly concentrating on life and death issues now, should the closure of schools persist beyond the summer, action should be taken to prevent this generation losing the liberating potential of good schooling.

One available option to address the issue would be to reallocate the Pupil Equity Fund. If schools remain shut, its many millions of pounds will be unspent. This could be targeted instead, albeit with some administrative challenge, at supporting the individual needs of youngsters who require extra help to match the attainment levels of their peers. This could mean, for example, being allocated named online tutors to guide their learning, these paid volunteers recruited from recently retired cohorts of teachers or willing and qualified others. Part of the funding would also be required to provide relevant IT hardware to many youngsters who lack it currently, but that again is not insurmountable.

Many important social benefits of schooling will be irreplaceable sadly, but at least some degree of personal, academic, and pastoral support is not – if we were bold enough to consider it.

(Professor) Donald Gillies,

Dean of the School of

Education & Social Sciences, University of the West of Scotland, Glasgow G14.