• The attainment gap at Higher has further narrowed as the most disadvantaged surge
• Research reveals attainment gap in Primary schools is 6 times wider in English Primary schools
• Most disadvantaged attainment level in Secondary schools more than doubles in only 12 years
• Exam-based attainment gap narrows significantly in Scotland

The Herald today is joining in with an emerging media narrative to suggest the SNP has failed in its promises for school attainment improvement with Scottish education has been tarnished – despite Sturgeon’s promises and If the SNP can’t get education right, they are in deep trouble.

Education is infinitely improvable, never perfect and the mass of data gathered enables tabloid academics to selectively paint a picture that suits an anti-SNP agenda.

I was Associate Dean for Quality Assurance in an Education faculty. I wrote teacher development materials for the 5-14 Mathematics: Information Handling which were issued to all schools in the former giant Strathclyde Region. I spent 23 years in schools and in teacher education and a further 16 teaching research methods. I think I know a bit more than some of our so-called education correspondents.

The key points, selected from many more, are above with the details below:

1. The attainment gap at Higher has further narrowed as the most disadvantaged surge

The Scotsman and the Express, on 9 August 2023, reveal their ignorance and/or deviousness by ignoring the disruptions in 2020, 2021 and 2022 caused by pandemic measures and headline claims that the attainment gap between pupils in the most advantaged and most disadvantaged areas, at the SQA higher level has widened.

It has not. It has narrowed by almost 1% to 16% from 16.9% in 2019.

This is part of longer trends under SNP Government.

At SCQF level 7 (Advanced Higher), the gap in 2009/10, two years after the SNP first came to power, was 24.1 and by 2021/22 it was 22.2, though down from 25 in the previous year but more important the most disadvantaged group at this level was increasing in size dramatically.

In 2009/10 only 4.7% of those in the most disadvantaged 20% had achieved at this level but by 2021/22, the figure was 10.3%, more than doubling in only 12 years. Remember also, that 20% means nearly 3 000 pupils every year.

https://www.tes.com/magazine/news/secondary/sqa-results-2023

2. Research reveals attainment gap is 6 times wider in English Primary schools

Almost a year ago, the Nuffield Foundation reported:

The latest report reveals that the education system is still failing to bridge the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their better-off classmates. This issue has been intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, which seems to have impacted the attainment of primary school children from lower income families twice as much as their peers.

Less than half of disadvantaged children reach the expected level of attainment at the end of primary school compared with nearly 70% of their better-off peers.https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/news/little-progress-on-attainment-gap-could-have-lifelong-impact-on-disadvantaged-children

First, the attainment gap at the end of Primary school including largely literacy and numeracy scores, age 11, in England is more than 20%.

In Scotland Primary school ends a year later, age 12, so the comparison is not precise, but the gap is now only 3.4% in literacy and 3.7% in numeracy:

https://www.gov.scot/news/record-narrowing-of-the-attainment-gap/

3. Most disadvantaged attainment level more than doubles in only 12 years

Prof Lindsay Paterson, a mere statistician with no meaningful experience in school-level education in Scotland, but the regular Union ‘rentagob‘ to talk it down for English audiences, has latched onto the simple figures on ‘international comparison’ and ‘education inequality’ as his selling points to attract MSM editors.

Both are meaningless.

Critics, especially opposition politicians on the make and academics keen to impress them, rather than struggle with the more difficult task of impressing their peers with deeper understanding of how learning takes place, have picked opportunistically at the enormous array of attainment statistics now easily available to all of us.

A popular line, based on selective, misunderstood or dated evidence, is that Scottish schools are less successful than they used to be. Often the Pisa results are wheeled out as evidence of decline. Credible academics, other than those attention seekers mentioned above, are largely contemptuous of this extremely narrow set of data and its use to compare education in culturally and economically distinct societies.

For example, the East Asian systems, in South Korea and Shanghai/China, successful in Pisa, are based on gruelling programmes with 13-hour days and only 5.5 hours sleeping time. Social time is not mentioned at all. Professor Zhao of Oregon University has described them as:

‘Glorifying educational authoritarianism and romanticising misery.’[ii]

In 2014, the New York Times described South Korea’s system as ‘an assault on children’ and suggested that South Korea:

‘..produces ranks of over-achieving students who pay a stiff price in health and happiness. The entire programme amounts to child abuse.’[iii]

Pupil suicide rates are high in East Asia and low in the UK.[iv]

The successful, in Pisa terms, East Asian systems have also been accused of failing to develop the creativity, originality and innovation, industry requires and of leaving ‘special’ children to languish and fail.

In Scotland, there is a different culture and one the SNP in government shares with me and with, I feel sure, most Scots.

A clear piece of evidence lies in the progress toward narrowing the attainment gap at the end of Secondary education.

Critics can be found in much of the media shouting about our supposed failure to sufficiently narrow the gap between the most and the least deprived.

At SCQF level 7, the gap in 2009/10, two years after the SNP first came to power, was 24.1 and by 2021/22 it was still 22.2, though down from 25 in the previous year. If you have limited understating of statistics or cynically only wish to accuse the SNP Government of failure, these statistics hide the true nature of change.

In 2009/10 only 4.7% of those in the most disadvantaged 20% had achieved at this level but by 2021/22, the figure was 10.3%, more than doubling in only 12 years. Remember also, that 20% means nearly 3 000 pupils every year.

Over the same period 28.8% of those in the most advantaged 20% had achieved at this level and by 2021/22, the figure was 38.8%, a smaller in percentage but larger in actual numbers,  increase.[v]

So, despite the major improvement among those from the most deprived 20%, there had also been a significant improvement among the least deprived 20%. So, the gap had only narrowed slightly, after widening in the previous year, and two successes, one in a priority area for government, the gap widened in 2020/21 and then only narrowed in 2021/22, is then reported as failure.

We could, of course easily narrow the gap by simply denying access to Level 7 for many of those in the least disadvantaged 20%. That’s exactly the kind of social engineering they did in Albania for much of the second half of the 20^th Century and in Communist China during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s.

The attainment gap is a largely artificial and mostly political idea with no meaning for those it describes. What really matters is the massive improvement in the life chances of those in the most disadvantaged 20%. It’s not enough, of course, but this fact relates to the real experience of thousands rather than that of the media and opposition party opportunism.

There have been similar improvements in attainment for the other three groups between the most and the least disadvantaged. The gaps between them and the least disadvantaged are narrower and, of course, of no interest to the media.

Away from formal examination-based assessment, there has been considerable progress on narrowing attainment gaps, in primary schools, at a stage when there is not the pressure to compete for access to high status universities. In December 2022, we could read in Scottish Government announcements, if not in the media:

“The poverty-related attainment gaps in literacy and numeracy levels across primary schools have seen the biggest decreases since records began, official statistics show. The gap between the proportion of primary pupils from the most and least-deprived areas achieving expected levels has narrowed by 3.4 percentage points in literacy and 3.7 percentage points in numeracy, according to the Achievement of Curriculum for Excellence Levels (ACEL) 2021/22. This marks the largest narrowing of the gap in a year since consistent records began in 2016/17. There has also been a record increase in the proportion of primary school pupils achieving the expected levels of literacy (up 3.7 percentage points to 70.5%) and numeracy (up 3.3 percentage points to 77.9%).”[vi]

Taken together and based on evidence, we see a very different picture of the achievements of the SNP in Government, in this last decade and more, in assisting schools and learners to achieve all that they can achieve.

In the end, of course, most of the credit goes to the learners and to the schools but just as the opposition parties would want to claim credit had they been in government and, had the trends that matter gone the other way, they would blame us for it, the SNP in government deserves its share.

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[i] https://www.gov.scot/publications/summary-statistics-attainment-initial-leaver-destinations-no-5-2023-edition/documents/

[ii] http://zhaolearning.com/2014/03/09/how-does-pisa-put-the-world-at-risk-part-1-romanticizing-misery/

[iii] https://progressgp.wordpress.com/2014/08/03/does-south-koreas-education-system-hurt-its-students/

[iv] https://thediplomat.com/2017/03/hong-kongs-wave-of-student-suicides/

[v] https://www.gov.scot/publications/summary-statistics-attainment-initial-leaver-destinations-no-5-2023-edition/documents/

[vi] https://www.gov.scot/news/record-narrowing-of-the-attainment-gap/

4. Exam-based attainment gap narrows significantly in Scotland

Statistics from the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) show that for pupils in the 20 per cent most deprived areas of Scotland, the Higher pass rate was 70.2per cent this year, down from 83.2 per cent last year

The SQA said the attainment gap between the most and least deprived areas of Scotland was 15 percentage points in 2022, up from 7.8 percentage points in 2021. However the gap is narrower than in 2019, when it was 16.9 percentage points.https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/20611678.attainment-gap-widens-poorer-pupils-suffer-greater-impact-pandemic/

So, to repeat the bleeding obvious, you can’t meaningfully compare the exam-based 2022 results with the no-exam-based 2020 or 2021 results. Teachers in deprived areas were then given the power to actually close the gap by using their wider knowledge of what they felt pupils could do. You might want to make non-exam-based methods the norm but no credible educationist would make the comparison that has informed the above headlines.

Comparing 2019 and 2022 is also a bit problematic but it’s a lot more credible. So, the narrowing between 2019 and 2022 of 1.9% as a percentage of the 2019 gap, 16.9%, is 11.2%. That’s a statistically significant difference.

There’s more but this is long enough I suspect