Education secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville would not be drawn today on specific target dates for closing the attainment gap in Scotland.
The persistent “poverty-related attainment gap” has been a major focus of political debate since first minister Nicola Sturgeon said in 2015 that she wanted to close it “completely”, although that level of ambition was soon diluted.
The 2016 programme for government said the aim was to “substantially eliminate the gap over the course of the next decade”.
When pressed today on revealing dates by which significant progress could be expected in narrowing the attainment gap, however, Somerville described it as a “long-term project” and said she was “determined to see a greater pace of progress than before the pandemic”.
Ms Somerville was giving evidence this morning to the Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry - held by the Education, Children and Young People Committee of the Scottish Parliament - which started with convener and Tory MSP Stephen Kerr asking about target dates.
She replied: “I’m not going to set an arbitrary date on when the attainment gap will be closed, particularly so close to the experiences that we are still having with the pandemic.”
Mr Kerr said he had heard nothing from Ms Somerville today that was “very measurable”. The education secretary conceded that more “data transparency” was needed on the attainment gap and said that “the pandemic has had an impact on attainment”.
She suggested that new “stretch aims” - where councils set locally tailored annual targets - would be used to measure progress.
“What we very much intend to do through the stretch aims…is for local authorities to be able to determine what can be done in their area and what support is required from our national agencies to be able to support them to do so,” she said.
Ms Somerville added: “We are determined to see a greater pace of progress than we were before the pandemic, and that’s what the stretch aims are an important part of.”
Meanwhile, Scottish Labour education spokesperson Michael Marra accused Ms Somerville of making a ”damning admission” to the committee after she said that Pupil Equity Fund (PEF) money could be used can be used to compensate for previous cuts in education budgets.
“This funding should be laser-focused on closing Scotland’s shameful attainment gap, but instead it is papering over the cracks caused by years of underfunding by the SNP,” he said in a statement after the committee.
In 2018, the education secretary at the time, John Swinney, said: “Pupil equity funding must be used for additional purposes, not as a replacement.” He agreed, for example, that in places where swimming lessons had been cancelled, using PEF to reinstate swimming lessons was not acceptable.
Mr Marra raised the issue again because changes in how Scottish Attainment Challenge funding is allocated to Scotland’s 32 local authorities mean that some councils, including his city of Dundee, will receive far lower allocations than they did in the 2016-21 Scottish Parliament.
“So what you are saying now is that now PEF money in Dundee should be spent to backfill the cuts you have made?” Mr Marra asked the education secretary.
Ms Somerville replied: “I wouldn’t dictate how Dundee or any other local authority would deal with education - that is for them to do.
“But I think you have been given evidence by not just one of the directors of education but by others [at previous Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry sessions] that there is a holistic approach to funding…and that a headteacher can use PEF funding if they wish to do so following a local authority’s decisions.”
