A REPORT appeared this week which reflected the life prospects of young Scots. It had nothing to do with the constitution or shenanigans in St Andrew’s House. Rather it came from Audit Scotland under the title: “Improving Outcomes for Young People Through School Education”.

This is the real world; the territory on which elections should be fought. Its importance will only increase because the picture it paints of the attainment gap between relative affluence and deprivation is destined to grow in the post-covid period without far, far more being done to change course.

Without dramatic counter-measures, damage will be carried forward for decades to come. Thank goodness for Audit Scotland – a rare surviving voice of independent analysis – but is anyone listening? Where is the political will or self-awareness when John Swinney “welcomes” the report on grounds that it “clearly shows significant progress has been made in the last five years”.

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No, it doesn’t. That is the language of complacency and deception. The report. actually says: “The poverty-related attainment gap remains wide and inequalities have been exacerbated by Covid-19. Progress on closing the gap has been limited and falls short of the Scottish government’s aims”. In what way, Mr Swinney, does that indictment become synonymous with “significant progress?”.

Just as depressing as the educational outcomes is Audit Scotland’s comment on the absence of reliable data. Examination results, they stress, do not represent the whole story though even they are seen as inadequate and inconsistent across Scotland, with outcomes deteriorating in some areas. But what else is there to go on?

Are we meant to know what is actually going on in schools when it is politically more convenient to generalise about “significant progress?”. According to Audit Scotland, the data did not allow them to judge the Scottish Government on its four stated priorities: improving literacy and numeracy, closing the gap between rich and poor, improving child wellbeing and preparing children for work.

In 2015, an Attainment Fund was created specifically to address the void that exists. Almost all the increase in spending on schools has come from this source and, according to head teachers, the extra money is indeed of use where they are given the flexibility to deploy it according to a school’s priorities.

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The problem with the Attainment Fund is that is limited to nine local authority areas which have the highest ratings in the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. This is a crude instrument which disregards deprivation in the other 22 Scottish council areas and is not based on the needs of individual children within the town, village or classroom outside these boundaries.

The methodology, says Audit Scotland, does not take account of rural poverty or the costs of delivering education in remote communities. “Nor does it reflect isolated deprivation in more affluent areas, or councils with high numbers of pupils in deprived areas but proportionately less” than for councils with smaller populations.

Leaving aside the Attainment Fund, over a five-year period funding for Scottish schools increased by just £200 million – to put it in perspective, the cost of two unfinished ferries lying in Port Glasgow. There are over 5000 schools and 792,000 pupils in Scotland.

That is no trite debating point for it illustrates a fact,which tends to get lost in wider debate; every pound wasted is a pound that could be spent on the desperate needs of Scotland’s poorest communities. If the most intractable challenges are ever to be met, there needs to be a Comprehensive Spending Review which revisits priorities and scrutinises every pound of non-essential spending. That is long overdue.

All this will become more urgent in the post-covid period yet where is the evidence of an approach driven by the imperatives of social justice? Everyone knows that the poorest kids have been hit hardest by being out of school whether from malnourishment or loss of learning time, often because the parents – however well-intentioned – are not themselves equipped for the task.

When it comes to that kind of scenario, exam results become an even more unsatisfactory measure of where priorities must lie. Yet, last month, a report from the Education Policy Institute expressed alarm that only 20 per cent of “education catch-up” money in Scotland is being devoted to the most deprived pupils.

This cannot be right. I have long argued for Early Intervention as the first priority of Scottish education. If there are ever going to be serious inroads into closing the attainment gap, then it must come at the earliest stages of the child’s development before patterns are formed, often due to inter-generational disadvantage.

If that was true before the pandemic, then it is doubly so now. The Audit Scotland report is a serious warning that all the fine words about being "judged by education” have added up to not a lot.

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Just as life expectancy in large parts of Scotland has decreased over the past decade, so life prospects for most children from poor backgrounds has remained, at best, static.

Give teachers and ancillary staff the resources and they will do the job. That has been proven over and over again. But there has to be an understanding that exam results and university entrance statistics are not only inadequate indicators of success and failure but cruelly irrelevant to the life prospects of children with all the odds stacked against them.

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