Chamber and committees

When Audit Scotland reviews the process again, as I am sure it will, I hope that it will appreciate that we are working with local government in the area. We are collating the local aims, which will help us to provide a picture of what will happen nationally.

My expectation is that every single local authority will work with Education Scotland as they deliver their stretch aims, and that they will be as challenging as possible. Those will differ in the—

With the greatest respect, convener, it will be measurable once the local authorities have developed their stretch aims, and my understanding is that they will be developed by September, for the new academic year. They are very accountable, and they will be obvious and measurable—we will be able to measure progress. I think that, actually—

It is up to individual schools to determine the programmes that they have, and then Education Scotland works with schools to collate the information. I do not have to hand the information about how each individual school has spent its money. It is for Education Scotland to link with the schools to determine how they have spent the money and to work out what has worked and what has not worked. We are keen to have in the new, refreshed attainment challenge more of a link between the local authority and the school so that they are also collating information about how the money has been spent.

We would be happy to provide further information on the relationship between Education Scotland, local authorities and schools and on how the money is spent, but I do not have the detail of every school with me today.

They were happening in a different guise in different areas. We have tried to ensure that we have specific meetings to go over aspects of this, but they are not the only meetings that I have with Education Scotland.

As, I think, I have said already, the pandemic had an impact on the progress that was being made. However, when we look at the pre-pandemic figures—for example, the year-on-year achievement of curriculum for excellence levels data that was published—we see that the trend was positive.

In the two-year period between 2016-17 and 2018-19, the number of primary school pupils who were achieving the expected levels increased by 3.1 percentage points in literacy and by 2.7 percentage points in numeracy. The gaps in achieving expected levels of numeracy between the young people from the most and least deprived areas of Scotland reduced in both years. Although we saw that progress, and although we continue to see very good statistics for those who are leaving school and going on to positive destinations—indeed, they are now at a record level—we are obviously keen to see further, more accelerated progress.

I mentioned in my introductory remarks that we have changed the mission of the SAC programme. That is very clearly to draw further focus on the fact that, although we can do a lot within education to improve outcomes for children and young people, we are aware that poverty is not something that can be solved between the hours of 9 and 3, when a child is in school. What happens outwith that period is exceptionally important as well.

That is why we are keen to ensure that there is a very specific link between the education work and the work that is happening in the tackling child poverty delivery plan around increases to the Scottish child payment, taking account of the cost of the school day, increases to school clothing grants, the ability of children and young people to take any subject without receiving charges for it, core curriculum charges, music charges, and so on. We are determined to ensure that the education work and the anti-poverty work are linked very specifically.

That is made more difficult by the cost of living crisis and by policies that are being made elsewhere in the United Kingdom and dictated by the UK Government, which are impacting on poverty levels. Within what we have the ability to control up here, we are keen to make sure that there is a very express link between what is happening in education and what is happening in our wider anti-poverty work.

I think that you will see the poverty-related attainment gap in many different countries. It is not specific to Scotland. We see the same challenges elsewhere in the UK and, indeed, further afield, but we have also seen a determination to tackle them in Scotland.

Absolutely. The national Government is clear that, when possible, we should work in partnership with local government on many of these issues. As I have said, the work that we are doing on stretch aims, for example, is something that many local authorities have been doing to some extent. We are trying to ensure that all local authorities take part in that process and that there is transparency in that improvement work.

Of course, local authorities are responsible for delivering the decisions on education that are, quite rightly, taken at a local authority or school level. Just as you would expect the national Government to challenge itself on its responsibilities and targets, it is very much the responsibility of a local authority to challenge itself on why there is variation either within the local authority or with another local authority. I hope that the role and responsibilities of local government are very clear in the refreshed attainment challenge, in which we set out the roles and responsibilities of the different parts of the system.