St Catherine’s Primary in Paisley has taken the top spot for best performing primary school in Scotland - despite high levels of deprivation in its catchment areas - with primary seven (P7) pupils performing 'flawlessly' in reading, writing, numeracy, listening and talking.
The latest Sunday Times Scotland list put Auchinleck Primary School in East Ayrshire - a former mining town - among the most improved primary schools in Scotland.
Only a tiny fraction of its P7 pupils could count and communicate to the required standard in 2017, but last year, around 80% were proficient in reading, writing and numeracy, and every P7 was listening and talking to the required standard.
This comes as only four schools have consistently scored top marks across all disciplines over the last six years, all in Scotland’s affluent education areas of East Renfrewshire and East Dunbartonshire.
Analysis of percentage of P7 pupils meeting the required standard in core skills in Scotland’s curriculum for excellence, across the 1,200 schools that published reportable results, shows that almost half of Scottish pupils entering P1 since the pandemic are weaker learners than those who began primary school before the lockdowns.
The table is drawn from official data submitted to Scottish ministers. The Times Scotland assigned each primary school a score out of 400, which draws together the percentage of pupils up to standard in four skills into a single comparable metric.
Schools which increased by at least 40 points - equivalent to a 10% increase across the four skills or an outstanding leap in a single discipline - were deemed to have improved. Schools which dropped by 40 points or more were deemed to have declined.
There are more than 2,000 primary schools in Scotland, but only around half have published Curriculum for Excellence performance data consistently over the last six years.
Out of 965 schools, some 485 P1 classes were lagging behind pre-pandemic levels in subjects such as literacy and numeracy. Around 342 P1 classes showed improvement and 138 saw no change.
A Times Scotland spokesperson said: “We are always careful to clarify that the league table is not ‘Scotland’s schools ranked from best to worst’.
“It presents government data from primary seven, arguably the most important year for pupils preparing for high school, for parents to analyse standards across the 1,250 schools that published reportable results.
“Scottish ministers claim they ‘don’t do league tables’ and maintain this facade by calling their aggregated spreadsheet of pupil performance the 'Acel', which stands for Achievement in Curriculum for Excellence Levels.
“It is a challenge for parents to find this data on the government quango’s website, which is why this information is so important.
“These statistics do not capture the full range of success and adversity teachers and pupils face each day, but they do enable parents to grasp core information relating to the performance of their children’s schools.”
The Acel database ranks the percentage of pupils meeting the four key indicators of reading, writing, numeracy, plus combined listening and talking.
It also counts the percentage of pupils that hail from deprived neighbourhoods, using the government’s Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation.
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