Thread by @MrMcEnaney

THREAD

Scottish Government set to miss all four of its 2020 targets for closing the attainment gap in literacy and numeracy

Here's what you need to know about the data behind the story

thetimes.co.uk/article/john-s…

First of all, both the targets and the attainment data come from official publications. This is Scottish Government data and exactly the sort of thing we are apparently supposed to be using to, in the FM's words, judge them on their record.

Let's start with the targets.

In August last year I asked the govt to show me how they are measuring the fabled 'attainment gap' and how they will know if it is closing. I was very clear that I wanted "specific" measurements, not general references.

And they obliged.

They gave me a link to this page, helping titled "Measuring the Attainment Gap". It gives the different metrics they will use, with 11 "key measures" - 4 of these relate to literacy and numeracy in schools.

gov.scot/publications/2…

And of course literacy and numeracy performance are particularly critical here, because they underpin some of the other measures (like attainment of qualifications) and because it was concerns over literacy and numeracy performance that kicked off the current policy drive.

Now, if you scroll down that page you also find some difficult-to-read bar graphs. This is where the targets can be found (if you zoom in and squint a bit). They're under the sub-heading "Stretch Aims" (despite being, it seems, the *only* targets that have been set).

And here they are close up, with the 2019/2020 goals circled.

The goals use SIMD data but rather than operating in deciles (which would compare the richest 10% with the poorest 10%) it's in quintiles (so richest 20% compared with poorest 20%).

So the targets are pretty clear. In this academic year, the govt was hoping to cut the primary school literacy gap from 22 points to 16 points and the S3 literacy gap from 14 points to 10 points.

In numeracy, they wanted to cut the primary school gap from 17 points to 13 points and hoped to get the S3 gap down from 15 points to 11 points.

So.........how are they getting on?

Well to figure that out we need to look at the Achievement of a Curriculum for Excellence Level data published by the government in December.

You can get that here:
www2.gov.scot/Topics/Statist…

From that we can extract the actual gap in each of the last 3 years (taking us back to the same starting point as the government's targets) and compare it to where they hope to be by the end of this year, and in doing do get an idea of how likely they are to meet their targets.

And this, ultimately, is what we need:

So what does it show? Well in primary, the literacy gap has shrunk by 1.1 points in 3 years, leaving a further 4.1 point reduction needed (if we are as generous as possible on the rounding) in just 1 year.

For primary school numeracy, the gap has been cut by 0.5 points in 3 years, and another 3.4 points needs to come off this year for targets to be met.

The S3 literacy picture is even worse, because in the 3 years so far the gap actually increased by 0.2 points, and a 3 point reduction is needed in a single year to hit the target.

Finally, S3 numeracy shows a 1.3 point reduction in the gap over 3 years, but that still leaves the govt needing a further 2.1 point reduction in the final year.i

I took the data to both @LucyHunterB and @BarryBlackNE (both quoted in the story) and they agreed that the government is set to miss all four of these targets.

And there's another point worth making, while we're here: it shouldn't be this difficult to get this sort of information, particularly in a country where the First Minister wants us to judge her on her record in terms of closing the attainment gap.

Until next time...