Fears that Scottish schools’ attempts to recover from the Covid pandemic and close the attainment gap will be stymied by a lack of data have been raised in a new report.
The report from the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee identifies “a gap in robust evidence” on how the pandemic has affected efforts to close the attainment gap.
One expert told the committee that better evidence was required because “we need to know how to get back on track” after Covid.
“It is important to understand the full extent to which the pandemic has impacted on closing the poverty-related attainment gap,” says the report.
“There is a need to establish a national baseline on which to base post-pandemic targets. The committee asks the Scottish government to set out how it will, as a matter of urgency, establish a national baseline for measuring progress in closing the attainment gap following the pandemic.”
The report warns: “There is a gap in robust evidence on the impact of the pandemic on closing the attainment gap.”
How has Covid affected the attainment gap?
It says that an Audit Scotland report “stated that data collection on national performance for primary and early secondary pupils was cancelled in 2020 due to the pandemic and that this will affect performance tracking over time”.
Nevertheless, Audit Scotland had seen enough in 2021 to conclude in a report of its own that “the poverty-related attainment gap remains wide, with limited progress on closing the gap, and that inequalities have been exacerbated”.
Children’s charity the NSPCC “pointed to gaps in evidence on children and young people’s educational experiences during the pandemic”, according to the parliamentary committee’s report.
It adds that the NSPCC “would welcome further disaggregation of data to understand which groups of children...have been affected by the disruption to schooling and wider community support services”.
The charity also identified “a lack of evidence on marginalised groups, including refugee and asylum seekers [and] black and ethnic minority children and young people”, the report says.
The report, entitled Scottish Attainment Challenge, underlines the “need to establish a baseline from which to measure progress in narrowing the attainment gap post-pandemic”, pointing to evidence from Emma Congreve, a knowledge exchange fellow at the Fraser of Allander Institute, which specialises in economic research.
She had told the committee: “We cannot simply say that the targets are not achievable because of Covid and that we should forget about them...If the targets are missed, we need to know why and we need to know how to get back on track. Therefore, evidence is incredibly important.”
Professor Becky Francis, chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation, said it was “right to say that there is an emergency in relation to the widening gaps” and that “we need to diagnose where there has been learning loss during the pandemic and then think of short-term means to address the gap.”
The Scottish government, in its response to the inquiry that led to today’s report, said it had “published a substantial body of quantitative and qualitative evidence of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on a range of different groups of learners”.
The government also said that any data gaps were at a national level, but that teachers and schools routinely assess progress in literacy and numeracy and so, as today’s report puts it, “have access to the information they need to inform learning and teaching”.
The report also notes that Education Scotland said it could “quantify the impact of the pandemic on the attainment gap to an extent with the National Improvement Framework (NIF) data that was published in December”. However, Education Scotland stated that it was “difficult to quantify [the impact of Covid] in a single figure” and, the report says, that the picture had to be “examined at local authority level and school level”.
Despite a shortage of evidence, MSPs have seen enough to say that “the pandemic is considered to have made existing inequalities in educational outcomes worse”.
They point, for example, to the growing divides in literacy and numeracy highlighted in the Achievement of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) Levels 2020-21 report, published in December 2021.
Teachers in the inquiry “expressed frustration at the loss in attainment after making headway before the Covid-19 disruption”. Some said that “any expectation of improvement in attainment between March 2020 and now is ‘completely unrealistic’” and that, in the current circumstances, “maintaining [existing] levels was viewed by some as a ‘great success’”.
Teaching unions told the committee that, since the onset of the pandemic, there had been “a rise in challenging behaviour, mental health issues and staff absences, which have greatly increased the workload of teachers”.
Today’s report also records the concerns of the Poverty Alliance: “As well as the closure of schools impacting on children and young people’s attainment, the removal of many different forms of ‘out of school’ provision was felt acutely by priority family groups, particularly lone-parent families.”
The most vulnerable children ‘still lose out’
The Robert Owen Centre for Educational Change told the committee’s inquiry of its insight gleaned from eight years of working with a range of partners across the Scottish education system, in an attempt to achieve equity in schools.
“This has revealed how, despite the serious national commitment to enhancing excellence and equity and a huge range of well-intentioned initiatives, the most vulnerable children and young people still lose out, and that the established links between education and disadvantage have yet to be broken,” the inquiry report states.
The committee also heard from teachers and parents that, since the start of the Scottish Attainment Challenge in 2015, there has been progress in “developing the culture of focusing on equity in schools, including a greater awareness and understanding of the barriers facing children and young people”.
Mel Ainscow, a University of Glasgow professor of education, said: “One of the major achievements, which should not be underestimated, is that, as far as I can see, everyone in the Scottish education system is clear on the agenda. They are clear that the push for equity and the concern for excellence are central to everything.”
Tony McDaid, education director at South Lanarkshire Council, described the “huge impact” of the work of organisations such as the Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland, which had helped schools to become “sensitive to the issues, including the importance of removing barriers to participation in extracurricular and residential activities”.
Sue Webber, convener of the Education, Children and Young People Committee, and a Conservative MSP, said: “During this inquiry the committee heard positive stories about the work being done by schools to tackle the poverty-related attainment gap.
“However, in our report, we have noted Audit Scotland’s conclusion that there has been limited progress on closing the poverty-related attainment gap and that inequalities have been worsened by Covid-19.
“It is essential that the reforms to the government’s education agency [Education Scotland] ensure the new schools inspectorate is able to monitor the effectiveness of the implementation of plans to close the poverty-related attainment gap.”
The report can be read here.
