The education director in a Scottish council losing out on almost £3 million of funding because of the Scottish Attainment Challenge “refresh” says its means that some projects cannot continue.
However, Ruth Binks, Inverclyde Council’s director of education, communities and organisational development, also told MSPs today that the changes are “a fair thing to do”.
At the end of 2021, the Scottish government revealed that instead of targeting attainment challenge funding at the nine authorities with the highest levels of deprivation, it would be taking the funding they received - a total of around £43 million a year - and sharing it out among all 32 councils.
One of the biggest losers is Inverclyde Council, which received £3,467,107 in 2021-22 - but will see that sum of money drop to just £593,532 by 2025-26.
Today - as the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee continued its inquiry into the Scottish Attainment Challenge - the committee convener, the Conservative MSP Stephen Kerr, asked Ms Binks how the council was going to cope with “the slashing of funding”.
Ms Binks said: “The money has gone up to £3.2 million in the attainment challenge for us and, if you are asking me would I like to keep the £2.8 million we will lose, the answer is yes, I would like to. Bottom line - of course I would.”
But she added that “we have to be pragmatic about this” and that the nine “challenge authorities” always knew “this was not guaranteed funding year upon year”.
She said: “I’m not saying I welcome the refresh [but] I do think it was a fair thing to do. I think we do need to look altruistically across the whole of Scotland.
“I think when we started as attainment challenge authorities, we were very much told that we were the pathfinders here to look at how to make things work - asked to adopt, adapt, abandon initiatives - and we certainly did do that, and it’s very helpful to see that a lot of the initiatives that the attainment challenge authorities took forward in the early days [are] now being rolled out wider.
“But I think I started by saying if I could keep the £2.8 million, I would absolutely welcome that. It is a big cut for Inverclyde - but I think it’s one that we always knew could and would happen.”
In April the EIS teaching union told the committee that it agreed with the “reframing” of the attainment challenge, but that it was “absolutely appalled at the levels of funding cuts to six of the original challenge authorities”. Secondary heads’ body School Leaders Scotland, meanwhile, said it was “surely immoral to take away that funding”.
Ms Binks said that in Inverclyde the funding cut would not lead to job losses.
However, Labour MSP Michael Marra said the changes in attainment challenge funding were going to lead to the loss of 100 posts in Dundee and 60 in North Ayrshire.
Mr Marra said that he recognised that there was poverty in every community, but that by redistributing the funding - as opposed to increasing the money available - it was effectively the kids in the poorest communities who would “pay the price to help the kids in rural poverty”.
Representatives from four education authorities - Glasgow, East Renfrewshire, Inverclyde, and South Lanarkshire - appeared before the committee today.
They insisted that attainment challenge funding had not been used to plug gaps in core budgets caused by council cuts, saying the money had been used for “additionality”. Their comments follow those of Greg Dempster - general secretary of primary school leaders’ body AHDS - who told the committee previously that “when the funding in a school or an authority goes down, some of the [Pupil Equity Fund] might not really be additional”.
Gerry Lyons - head of education at Glasgow City Council and a former secondary headteacher - told the committee today that progress had been made in closing the gap in Glasgow in a relatively short period of time, but there was now a “Covid frustration” because the pandemic had created a different set of issues.
But the education bosses said that the Scottish Attainment Challenge was making a difference. They said that teachers and other school staff were now better trained as a result of the funding and that there was a focus on the impact of poverty on education that had not been there before.
They argued, however, for looking at a broader range of attainment and achievement when it came to measuring success.
Mr Lyons said that the number of young people in the most deprived areas of Glasgow gaining Duke of Edinburgh’s Awards had increased more than fivefold, but that this “gets no recognition in this debate and it should”.
He also said that the focus should be on all the “exit qualifications” achieved by the end of a student’s school career, as opposed to at the end of S4 or S5, and that - while focusing on literacy and numeracy was right because these were “foundational” skills - “attainment across all the curricular areas” should be celebrated, particularly in primary schools.
Mr Lyons said: “Now that’s difficult to do well but let’s not minimise attainment in the arts and Stem and technologies - some of our schools do brilliant work on that but they don’t get the credit they deserve because maybe literacy and numeracy is still not quite where it should be.”
However, the most important debate in Scottish education just now was about how young people are assessed, he said.
“I would hope we could be a lot more creative in how we allow young people to demonstrate their learning and demonstrate their attainment,” said Mr Lyons.
It has charged University of Glasgow assessment expert Professor Louise Hayward with advising it on “how agreed principles may be translated into a design for delivering assessment and qualifications”. She is expected to report later this year.
