WITH Scotland’s educational attainment gap being so well documented, any new information on the issue is bound to be scrutinised.
Figures released today reveals a considerable disparity in the percentage of pupils from different council areas going to university. There were no real surprises in which local authorities sit top and bottom of the table. In East Renfrewshire, some 66 per cent of pupils go on to higher education after leaving school; in Clackmannanshire, the figure is just 25 per cent.
East Renfrewshire, of course, is one of the affluent areas of Scotland, and contains the country’s best-performing state schools, as we see from the latest league tables also featured in today’s Herald. Clackmannanshire, on the other hand, has been struggling with a wide range of social deprivation factors for some years.
Overall, the pupil destination figures show record numbers of Scottish pupils going into higher education and that is, of course, to be commended.
We should not forget, however, that not all young people can or wish to go to university. As the currently under way Scottish Apprenticeship Week highlights, vocational education can be a far more suitable pathway to a range of professions, including construction and engineering, and can bring a range of benefits to the young people, businesses and indeed the wider economy.
For many youngsters, meanwhile, a college place will give them the qualification they need to move forward into fulfilling employment. Higher education is not the only or indeed an automatic route to a successful career.
That said, the disparities from local authority to local authority the figures highlight cannot and should not be ignored.
Neither can the fact that for now, as both the “destination” figures and school league tables appear to show, the narrative on pupil attainment remains stubbornly unchanged: poorer children are still left behind their wealthier peers.
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