SNP blew £1 billion failing to close the educational attainment gap. Labour must learn from its mistakes – Barry Black

The SNP’s failure to improve the exam results of the poorest children shows the need to focus on tackling child poverty. Labour should rethink its approach

The debate about education in Scotland has sometimes seemed divorced from the reality in the classroom (Picture: Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

Teacher and scientist Carl Sagan once said it is “better the hard truth than the comforting fantasy”. And there can’t be any group of people in more need of hard truths than policymakers in Scottish education. There is a comforting fantasy, continually rehearsed by those at the top, that progress is being made on educational equality in Scotland, that the gap in results between the richest and poorest pupils is closing. The hard truth is simply that it is not.

The SNP will not close the attainment gap, nor are they set to make any real progress towards it. However, there is another hard truth, and it is a somewhat depressing one for those of us with ambitions for greater equity in education. If an incoming Labour government hopes to make any substantial progress towards doing so, it must change the course it is on.

Scratch not too far beneath the surface, and the evidence shows that the reality in Scotland’s classrooms and the rhetoric and focus of ‘the debate’ around it exist on different planets. The core issue is that the education attainment gap is not driven within the four walls of the classroom, it’s a reflection of broader societal inequalities.

That is not to say education policy and how you target investment does not matter, it does. But it is to say you can’t ‘close’ the attainment gap without closing the gap in socio-economic inequality. This is due to the well-evidenced fact that poorer young people are more likely to lack the resources and control over their learning.

To that end, the debate on education has been in a state of paralysis for at least a decade now, stuck in a cycle of counterproductive political infighting that could not be further removed from the lived reality of teachers, the experience of families or the learning of young people.

Throughout that time, it has produced a range of botched, glacial and unneeded reform, all while those school leaders, teachers and young people continued on with the school day, including during the shock of the pandemic. Much of this stems from the increasing politicisation of the education of our young people.

That visceral politicisation began with Nicola Sturgeon’s comforting fantasy: that her government could entirely close the gap in educational attainment between the richest and poorest Scots by 2026. It is a commendable ambition and an inspired idea that should be a guiding principle of government, but it has proven a preposterous promise to rigidly stick to and it has inspired a range of perverse incentives and misguided reforms.

All too predictably in the nature of politics in Scotland, rather than having the commitment being used to confront hard truths about the impact of inequality and poverty on learning and how best to confront it, it has been used as a constant game. This has been almost by necessity due to the fact Nicola Sturgeon made it the SNP’s ‘defining mission’, but has led to a situation where the government and opposition argue over minute changes in the direction of statistics that ‘prove or disprove’ whether or not the SNP will meet their target.

The reality is that they won’t. My research shows that the trends are stark and clear. The attainment gap is as large now as it was pre-pandemic and, despite government rhetoric, it was not closing in the years running up to 2020 either.

In order to attempt to meet their commitment, the Scottish Government has spent more than £1 billion on the ‘Scottish Attainment Challenge’ – targeted money to the poorest local authorities and schools to boost attainment. It has failed to do that, and has now been reformed, resulting in cuts to those local authorities.

In order to address educational inequality, there needs to be a reduction in child poverty. A far better intervention, I am willing to predict, will be the Scottish Government’s transformative Scottish Child Payment.

Clearly, more action is needed on child poverty. Around one in four children live below the poverty line. A damning indictment and a national shame if ever there was one. Fundamentally, drastic action is also needed from the UK Government to ensure young people have a better start, and chance, in life.

But to suggest all that is needed is a change of government, in Scotland or the UK, is another comforting fantasy. There is a hard truth the Scottish Labour party must confront when they talk about the attainment gap. An incoming UK Labour government is set to retain the Tories’ two-child benefit cap. Under this policy, parents are not entitled to any extra support through universal credit or child tax credit to raise a third or subsequent child born after April 6, 2017. Looking at the evidence, it’s hard to see how there can be a systemic reduction in child poverty at the level needed with the cap in place.

House of Commons Library research shows that more than 80,000 children in Scotland are impacted by the cap, ingraining ‘deep’ poverty. Given the nature of the policy, the number of households that will be impacted will only continue to grow. Its removal would lift 30,000 children out of poverty in Scotland, its retention will drive thousands more below the line.

Child poverty and the impact of welfare policy of course extend well beyond education and attainment of skills and qualifications, but it is core to a young person's experience of learning, in school and beyond. The sooner we can drop the pretence and politicisation of a promise which has no hope of being honoured, and confront the real issues which drive it, the sooner we can advance real solutions. It will be of benefit to the young people our education system serves.

To get there though, radical changes are needed. That's the hard truth, and it’s a truth that fantasies won’t fix.

Barry Black is a postgraduate researcher in education at the University of Glasgow