The Scottish Attainment Challenge has been a prominent feature of the education landscape since its launch in 2015, when first minister Nicola Sturgeon said she wanted to be judged on closing the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils.

Those are words that have come back to haunt her repeatedly over the intervening years, given that official assessments of attainment since have shown a mixed picture at best when it comes to improvement. These include the reports published earlier this year that attempted to sum up, as the last Scottish Parliament was drawing to a close, whether the gap was indeed closing.

The auditor general concluded in March - after a government investment of more than £750 million between 2016 and 2021 - that progress in closing the gap had been “limited” and “falls short of the Scottish government’s aims”. Now, as the government begins to invest a promised £1 billion over the course of the current Parliament, it is looking to shake things up.

Up to now, the Attainment Challenge has targeted funding at the nine local authorities identified by the government as facing the most extreme challenges. It also had a Challenge Schools programme targeting 70-plus primaries and secondaries outside of these authorities, and in 2017-18 the Pupil Equity Fund (better known now as PEF, of course) was introduced to give money directly to schools based on the number of pupils claiming free meals.

The impact of the Scottish Attainment Challenge

In 2018-19 a fund was also introduced to support care-experienced children and young people, and there was a fund for national programmes involving mentoring and youth work.

Ultimately, while welcome and well intentioned, the Scottish Attainment Challenge ended up being a bit of a hotchpotch and, even with all the additions and revisions that had been made to the scheme, the auditor general nonetheless concluded that the way funding had been targeted “does not fully capture pupils living in poverty”.

So, the government has decided to change things - the Scottish Attainment Challenge will no longer focus on the nine Challenge authorities. Instead, the £43 million that would have been invested in them will be spread among all 32 Scottish councils. The schools programme will cease to exist and the government is “redirecting” the funding it received (around £7 million in 2021-22) into the £130 million Pupil Equity Fund.

There will be £11.5 million for care-experienced children and young people, and £9 million will be invested in national programmes to support initiatives such as youth work and mentoring.

But while the new funding model is more streamlined and easier to understand, it does mean that the authorities that were previously the focus of the Scottish Attainment Challenge are going to take a hit: namely Clackmannanshire, Dundee, East Ayrshire, Glasgow, Inverclyde, North Ayrshire, North Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire and West Dunbartonshire.

In a bid to lessen the impact, the funding cut to these councils is to be phased in over the next four years.

The Attainment Challenge funding going to Glasgow - which has notoriously high levels of child poverty - will remain relatively stable, going from £7.8 million next year to £7 million in 2025-26.

But some of the Challenge authorities stand to lose millions. Dundee, for example, will lose around £3.7 million over the four-year period and Inverclyde will see its funding reduced by over 75 per cent, going from £2.7 million in 2022-23 to £600,000 in 2025-26.

Responding to these changes in the Scottish Parliament, Labour education spokesperson Michael Marra accused the SNP of making “callous cuts to the education of the poorest children in our poorest communities”.

Stephen McCabe, a Labour councillor and the leader of Inverclyde Council, is the children and young people spokesperson for the councils’ umbrella body, Cosla. When the government announced the changes to the Attainment Challenge, he was quoted welcoming “the recognition that councils across Scotland will be pivotal in work to tackle the attainment gap”.

This week, he told Tes Scotland that the only way the level of funding to the nine Challenge authorities could have been maintained was if the government had “increased the overall funding pot to address the demands of the 23 non-Challenge authorities for funding”.

That didn’t happen and the concession won by the Challenge authorities, he said, was that the changes would be phased in over four years to give “education services and schools the opportunity to plan for the reduction”.

Mr McCabe said that he was awaiting a detailed report from his council’s director of education “on the implications of the reduced [Challenge] funding, which will include staffing implications”.

According to Mr Marra, who was a councillor in Dundee before being elected to the Scottish Parliament in May, one council leader told him that there was now going to be “no money to pay for 120 frontline education staff from Attainment Challenge funding”.

But, of course, there are also winners from the changes - councils like Edinburgh and Fife, which previously would have received nothing through this particular funding stream, are going to see their funding boosted by millions. By 2025-26, Fife will be receiving £3.4 million and Edinburgh £2.5 million.

Ultimately, though, the pot of cash to close the gap in 2021-22 was £215.2 million - which included a £20 million one-off boost to the PEF to support Covid recovery - and in 2022-23 it will be smaller, “up to £200 million”.

So, while there is agreement that the challenges that schools now face in closing the gap have increased hugely with the pandemic, there has been no commensurate increase in the funding they will receive to address those challenges next year. And now some schools and authorities face the unenviable task of figuring out how to do more with less.

Emma Seith is a reporter at Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith

This article originally appeared in the 3 December 2021 issue under the headline “The financial reality for schools under new attainment gap plan”