SCOTLAND’S attainment gap has no single cause and there will be no single solution.
It is easy to understand why the debate around improving the performance and prospects of children from Scotland’s poorest areas is often focused on our classrooms.
Education will, of course, help close the gap, but our teachers and schools will never close it on their own. That is because the gap is not caused by education but by poverty.
Schools can make a difference to the trajectory of a child’s life, but any intervention will be more powerful if it also addresses the complex causes of poverty.
This demands a partnership between educators, local authorities, charities, children, families and communities.
The Coalition of Care and Support Providers in Scotland, representing children’s charities, is right to emphasise the importance of partnership and planning.
Their #plan4children campaign is urging candidates in May’s council elections to work with them to plan and deliver the most effective children’s services founded on early intervention.
Services, whoever is providing them, need to be based on strong analysis of what works best.
We must ensure best evidence is drawn on, best practice adopted and best schemes extended.
The research is there, but how each service is actually delivered and how they join together is crucial. A project’s success or failure will often depend on how well connected it is to other services and that, in turn, depends on local authorities building strong, working relationships with charities.
The challenge for councils is to locate the charities delivering the most efficient, effective work and then work out how to roll it out as an extended partnership.
Charities often deliver a really good pilot project, but transition into the mainstream is more difficult, for the charity and the service.
Scotland’s child poverty strategy talks about pockets, prospects and places, that is maximising household income, increasing opportunities, and improving neighbourhoods, and it is founded on ensuring services are integrated at point of use.
The strategy has the big vision, but the challenge is how to translate that vision into reality. Sometimes it happens very well, sometimes it doesn’t.
Councils need to understand what charities are doing in the communities and how that links into schools and social services.
Barnardo’s ran a project called Threads in Renfrewshire, for example, encouraging parents to interact more with their children and use reading and writing in everyday life. That needs to happen more.
There are some real challenges to greater partnership at the moment. There is uncertainty around the future structure of local authorities, the future structure of our schools, and the future levels of funding.
Our charities also face uncertainty with services regularly put out to tender by councils and increasing competition.
One thing remains certain, however. No one thing will close the attainment gap, but the priority must be concerted and unified action to deliver proven and effective services.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here