Attainment gap between pupils from wealthy and deprived areas closes only slightly despite being SNP’s core mission
Ministers in Scotland are facing intense criticism over a sluggish increase in exam passes by teenagers from deprived areas after repeated promises to greatly improve performance.
Opposition parties and Scotland’s largest teaching union said progress in closing the attainment gap – the difference between exam passes for pupils from the wealthiest areas and those from the most deprived – was too slow and too patchy.
In 2016, Nicola Sturgeon, then the first minister, published her government’s legislative programme with the promise that “substantially eliminating” the attainment gap by 2026 would be her government’s “defining mission”.
This year’s exam results showed that the attainment gap had closed slightly year on year for pupils sitting National 5s, the Scottish equivalent to GCSEs, falling from 17.2 percentage points last year to 16.5 points this year.
