The Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee began taking evidence today for its inquiry into the effectiveness of the Scottish Attainment Challenge.

Here’s what a panel of poverty campaigners and education academics told MSPs about what needs to happen next:

1. Devolve more power to headteachers

It is time to give teaching back to teachers, said the University of Glasgow’s Professor Mel Ainscow. “Significant structural adjustment” to the attainment challenge was needed “to make better use of the expertise that’s there in the schools and in the classrooms”.

He said Scotland was “blessed with the most remarkable expertise” among heads and teachers and they knew their context best. Now, they needed the freedom to put in place the support their pupils needed.

The role of councils and inspectors would then be to monitor what was going on and also to coordinate it. He said there needed to be “high trust” for schools but also “high accountability”.

Professor Ainscow said it was right that inspection was being reformed because in its current form it was not working. However - while praising the skill of teaching staff - he said headteachers were “frustrated” they couldn’t design their staffing profile.

2. Identify what works and spread good practice

Interventions to improve attainment needed to be more robustly monitored and evaluated to provide information about what was working, said economist Emma Congreve, a knowledge exchange fellow at the Fraser of Allander Institute.

There was a plan for monitoring progress closing the gap at a national level but at a smaller scale there was a lack of information, she said.

The panel agreed there was a lot of good practice in Scottish schools but said schools and councils needed to be better supported when it came to finding out about the interventions that work.

Initiatives such as tutoring schemes had been proven to work, said Dr Laura Robertson, a senior research officer at the Poverty Alliance, but were not widespread in Scotland.

A review of tutoring and mentoring support in Scotland published by the Poverty Alliance in October last year concluded that free tutoring was “sparse”, even though, according to the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), one-on-one tutoring interventions “have a high impact on attainment”.

Professor Becky Francis, chief executive of the EEF, was also giving evidence. She said: “Both schools and councils need a pipeline of evidence-led policies and also, fundamentally, interventions and programmes that they can use to support the most vulnerable children in school.”

That was the role of the EEF in the English education system, she said, adding that teachers were “very, very busy” and were not researchers.

3. Reduce child poverty

One of the first questions posed was why Scotland had failed to make more progress in closing the gap. Child poverty is not falling in Scotland and the cost of living crisis is likely to exacerbate the situation, said Ms Congreve.

Children living in poverty were not able to attend extracurricular activities and could struggle to work at home as a result of issues such as fuel poverty and overcrowding. They also did not have access to private transport.

All of these things, she said, affected children’s ability to learn and “go inside the school gates”.

She said that understanding “that side of the equation is incredibly important in the understanding of why we are in this position and why we are having this inquiry at this present time”.

Dr Robertson, meanwhile, praised schools that were attempting to improve their families’ financial circumstances - she highlighted an Edinburgh project called Maximise! but Glasgow schools have been offering similar support. One school secured £715,000 in unclaimed awards, grants and benefits for parents.  

4. Define the problem

Professor Francis said there was a difference between England and Scotland in terms of “diagnosis”. She was surprised to see that in Scotland determining the extent of learning loss as a result of Covid was based on “teacher assessment and perceptions” rather than tests “run by external organisations”.  

“You really need to know what the problem is that you are trying to solve,” she said.

She said that, in England, Renaissance Learning, the EEF, the National Foundation for Educational Research and Fischer Family Trust were all looking at the impact of the pandemic on the attainment gap.

5. What happens outside of school also matters

Children spend 80 per cent of their time out of school, said Dr Robertson. But extracurricular clubs are not feasible for families on low incomes who cannot afford to pay - or who do not have access to private transport to travel to and from activities.

She said there needed to be sustainable funding for the third sector and community organisations that families living in poverty relied upon for support. She also said that families living in poverty needed to be made aware of the support they were entitled to.