Defining the 'poverty-related attainment gap'

What is it? How is it defined? How is it measured?

SQA results day is this coming Tuesday (6th). The day is rightly - and importantly - one of celebration for the rewards of hard work of young people and the staff who support them to achieve their best.

It it also a day where the overall performance of the education system can be assessed and issues - such as the inequalities which exist within the system - can be seen in their rawest form. There is No Wrong Path, but for some the journey is easier.

One of the key focuses of this analysis on the day is the comparison of results between the richest and the poorest pupils. This is often referred to as the ‘poverty-related attainment gap’.

What is the ‘poverty related attainment gap’

The poverty-related attainment gap is the difference in educational performance and outcomes between the least and most deprived (richest and poorest, though we will return to this point in a second) young people in Scotland.

We hear this term routinely now in Scottish education - and have increasingly done so for over a decade.

This stems from the direct politicisation of the term in 2015 by then First Minster Nicola Sturgeon who said her Government ‘should be judged’ on whether or not they closed this gap in performance.

The Scottish Government then committed in its 2016 SNP manifesto that ‘our mission is to make significant progress in closing the gap within the next parliament [by 2021] and to substantially eliminate it within a decade [by 2026]’.

How is it measured?

In response to Parliamentary question S6W-21810 from Pam Duncan Glancy MSP, Cabinet Secretary Jenny Gilruth MSP set out that the Poverty-Related Attainment Gap is assessed using thirteen metrics: These measures are:

27-30 month review (children showing no concerns across all domains)

HWB: Children total difficulties score (age 4-12)

HWB: Children total difficulties score (age 13&15)

Primary - Literacy (P1, P4, P7 combined)

Primary - Numeracy (P1, P4, P7 combined, Secondary - Literacy (S3, 3rd level or better)

Secondary - Numeracy (S3, 3rd level or better), SCQF 4 or above (1 or more on leaving school)

SCQF 5 or above (1 or more on leaving school)

SCQF 6 or above (1 or more on leaving school)

Participation measure

Attendance

Initial Positive Destination

So - amazingly - while the Scottish Government use the qualifications young people leave school with (whether they have at least one pass the point at which they leave school) as a measure, they don’t use year-on-year qualifications (‘exam’) results. This is despite the Cabinet Secretaries insistence that ‘it is important to be able to measure the impact of the system on progress towards closing the poverty-related attainment gap.’

The system wide results that are published on Tuesday are not part of the metrics outlined.

However, despite the Government not using yearly results for the purpose of measuring the attainment gap, the results young people will get on Tuesday are incredibly important for assessing the patterns of inequality in the education system. They are the only independent measure of performance we have to assess the system year on year. And there is the fact that the results young people receive are incredibly important to the immediate options they have in their lives, whether this is access to Highers and Advanced Higher in certain subjects, further and higher education access, or further training and employment opportunities.

Defining deprivation

The poverty-related attainment gap is measured on place-based inequalities. It does not measure individual circumstances of a person, but rather the relative deprivation of their postcode.

SIMD (Te Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation) is metric of area deprivation used by the Scottish Government to assess deprivation and plan service delivery and policy responses. It is calculated using census data across 38 indicators of place=based deprivation from categories such as income, educational attainment, employment, housing and crime. It clusters population areas of between five hundred and one thousand people and ranks their level of relative deprivation from 1 to 10. Conventionally, these are amalgamated into quintiles and deciles.

For the purpose of the education attainment gap the people from the most deprived fifth (20%) of postcodes and the least deprived fifth (20%) of postcodes are compared.

Indeed, it is also important to note it measures deprivation not affluence. So although people may talk about comparisons between ‘the richest and the poorest’ (and I am guilty of this as anyone), the only thing SIMD can show us is comparisons of the ‘least and most deprived’.

Issues with SIMD

there are well-established problems with SIMD as an indicator of individual deprivation. Due to the nature in which SIMD maps deprivation by grouped area, the metric can misclassify some households. Indeed, individuals/families with a low income and low educational attainment who would otherwise normally be regarded as ‘deprived’ can fall into a SIMD category unrepresentative of these circumstances, should they live in a less deprived area. Similarly, critics suggest that SIMD downplays rural poverty and overestimates deprivation in urban city centres, often due to issues such as higher crime rates and poorer housing.

There is an element to which it is perhaps the ‘least worst’ system that we have, but hopefully this quick read sets out some of the issues with its definition.

There is also some evidence the Scottish Government is moving away from policymaking and spending based on SIMD. A Twitter(X) thread on that here.