It’s a decade to the day since former first minister Nicola Sturgeon declared her intention to close the attainment gap between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils - and asked to be “judged on it”.
Rightly, she hasn’t been allowed to forget that pledge she made at the Wester Hailes Education Centre in Edinburgh on 18 August 2015. The publication last week of her memoirs, Frankly - and the admission that she did not succeed in all that she set out to do in education - has led to renewed scrutiny of that vow and its success, or the lack thereof.
And, based on the data, a decade on, the government has, indeed, failed to close the gap - or to make anything like substantial progress.
‘Limited progress’ on attainment gap
As a 2021 Audit Scotland report rather bluntly put it, progress has been “limited and falls short of the Scottish government’s aims”.
More recently, the latest exam results, published earlier this month, showed a slight narrowing of the gap, but at Higher this amounted to a difference of just 0.1 percentage points: the gap in the A-C Higher pass rate between the most and least deprived went from 17.2 percentage points in 2024 to 17.1 in 2025.
The longer-term view is that, when it comes to national qualifications, most of the progress in closing the gap was made before 2015-16. That is, before the Scottish Attainment Challenge was launched.
That’s why, when first minister John Swinney or education secretary Jenny Gilruth get a grilling on the topic, it tends to be the Achievement of the Curriculum for Excellence Levels data - which tracks literacy and numeracy performance of P1, P4, P7 and S3 - they will turn to, or the government’s “positive destinations” figures.
But even these preferred datasets give cold comfort. The robustness of the positive destinations statistics has been criticised over a long period of time, given that young people are recorded as being in work irrespective of whether this is full-time, part-time or in a zero-hours contract.
Similarly, progress in closing the attainment gap in primary has been far from a resounding success.
The for literacy in P1, P4, and P7 shows the gap in the percentage of pupils from the most and least deprived areas attaining the expected level for their age and stage sitting at 22.1 percentage points in 2016-17 and 20.2 percentage points in 2023-24.
Meanwhile, the attainment gap for numeracy in primary (P1, P4, and P7 combined) was 17.6 percentage points in 2016-17 and 17.4 percentage points in 2023-24.
Still, the context has undoubtedly been tough, thanks to the Covid pandemic and its wide-ranging impact on everything from pupil attainment to mental health - and then the cost-of-living crisis and huge pressures on the public purse.
Heads’ support for Pupil Equity Fund
Meanwhile, ask any headteacher if they appreciate their Scottish Attainment Challenge funding - and, more precisely, the money from the Pupil Equity Fund (PEF) that goes straight to them - and the response will be a resounding “yes”.
At the the School Leaders Scotland conference in Aberdeen in November 2024, the potential disappearance of PEF after the May 2026 Scottish Parliament elections was described as a “major concern”.
Ms Gilruth has said that it would be an SNP government’s intention to continue PEF beyond 2026 - but she has also said that funding to close the gap, which was meant to be additional, is too often being used to plug gaps in non-education services that have arisen due to budget cuts.
She says the way schools are funded needs to be looked at - but how this might change, or how the next iteration of the Scottish Attainment Challenge might look, is unclear.
However, one positive change that the Attainment Challenge has arguably contributed to was flagged by the former EIS general secretary, Larry Flanagan, in an interview with Tes Scotland in 2021, before he stepped down in 2022.
In the 1980s, Mr Flanagan said, young people leaving school without qualifications was “just par for the course” but now the system was “absolutely focused on equity and tackling disadvantage”.
It was “a phenomenal change”, he said.
Now it is Ms Sturgeon’s belief that policies designed to tackle poverty such as the Scottish Child Payment and the Baby Box “will have the biggest long-term impact on educational attainment”, as well as the expansion of early learning and childcare.
Mr Flanagan echoed this in his comments, saying “we are going to have a poverty-related attainment gap as long as we have poverty in the general community”.
But the situation is not an either-or one - school-based anti-poverty measures are part of the fabric of education spending now, and are likely to coexist with any drive to combat poverty more generally.
In short, any attempt to remove the funding boost for schools launched in 2015 would be fiercely resisted and would undoubtedly have profound consequences for young people in school - even if, for now, the data makes it hard to demonstrate the impact.
Emma Seith is senior Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland reporter at Tes magazine
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