Schools are “crucial, fundamental anchor institutions” when it comes to the government’s mission to eradicate child poverty, Scotland’s first minister, John Swinney, has said.
In a major marking a decade of the Scottish Attainment Challenge, launched in 2015 by former first minister Nicola Sturgeon to close the attainment gap between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils, Mr Swinney claimed “significant progress has been made”.
However, he also said the challenge was “even greater” now than in 2015, due, in part, to “austerity and Covid”.
He said that, looking ahead, his “plea” was “to focus ever more on how we can use schools as trusted places of engagement and relationship… to build better outcomes for children and families within Scotland”.
Impact of poverty
The problems faced by families living in poverty were complex and difficult, said Mr Swinney, who was speaking at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow yesterday.
He was “focused very firmly…on the idea of meeting these challenges through the concept of whole-family support” - and hit out at “compartmentalism”, adding, “I totally abhor the way in which policy priorities are viewed in silos”.
The first minister emphasised the need “to work across policy boundaries to secure good outcomes”, and suggested that services could be grouped around schools in order to “support individuals better” and provide “the wraparound assistance of a whole range of support and different interventions”.
Interventions cited by Mr Swinney included the ; the ; the expansion of free early learning and childcare; free school meals; clothing grants; and support available from the health service and during maternity.
He said: “What I would say to you today, as we reflect upon 10 years of the Scottish Attainment Challenge, is this: I think we have achieved a great deal. I think there has been a good spirit of collaboration and policy focus on these endeavours.”
Schools as ‘anchor institutions’
Mr Swinney added: “We now have the opportunity, with the focus of government policy around child poverty, to see some of the solutions in a wider and more significant context. But schools will always be crucial - fundamental - anchor institutions to enabling that journey to be accomplished, because that is where the trusted relationships exist to enable that to be the case.”
When speaking about the attainment challenge in recent times, education secretary Jenny Gilruth has said that it would be an SNP government’s intention to continue the Pupil Equity Fund beyond 2026.
PEF goes directly to schools and makes up the largest part of the £200 million spent annually on the Scottish Attainment Challenge.
However, she has also said that funding to close the gap, which was meant to be additional to other spending, is too often being used to plug gaps in non-education services arising due to budget cuts.
She has said that the way schools are funded needs to be looked at, although specifics of any changes - or what the next iteration of the Scottish Attainment Challenge might look like - are unclear.
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