Children and young people in West Dunbartonshire schools are to be monitored by education officers in a bid to close the poverty related attainment gap.
The local authority has outlined its education recovery and improvement strategy for season 2022/23 and hopes to build on the success of the previous academic year by setting new “stretch aims” and targets which will be scrutinised by national agencies.
With West Dunbartonshire receiving less money annually from the Scottish Government’s attainment gap funding, the council will continue to promote the curriculum for excellence programme and the number of pupils achieving a SCQF level five and six by the time they leave school.
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The attainment challenge allocation to the council prior to 2022 was £2.04 million in both 2020/21 and 2021/22 and now sits at £1.7 million with further annual reductions expected until 2025/26.
During the most recent education committee, councillor Michelle McGinty said: “I know the report is saying that there is increased levels of local accountability to deliver this, but that’s on the back of losing the attainment funding.
“I think on the back of covid and all of the new issues we are now facing, the children find it difficult to attend school because they have not been there for so long.
“The number of children in nurseries that have been kept behind this year is quite significant and it’s because of covid. I don’t know how we are expected to deliver without that additional funding.”
Councillor McGinty was informed that officers would identify schools where the attainment gap was expected to be bigger.
A council officer said: “As part of our local authority improvement framework, we identify schools where the gap would be wider for our children and young people.
“We look to enhance the support within those schools. We are visiting schools and identifying these areas for focussed attention. We have plans in place to monitor the progress that all our children and young people are making.
“We are working very closely with all of our leaders to improve our data analysis to identify young people who are not on track. We discuss the interventions that are in place to narrow that gap and that allows our children who need more support to gain it.”
Pupils will also continue to be given the opportunity to learn two languages, a musical instrument and take part in regular theatre trips.
Despite this, Labour councillor David McBride raised concerns that the reasons behind the attainment gap was largely due to poverty.
He said: “Due to the demographic of West Dunbartonshire, we have always struggled with attainment and we know that the reason for that is largely due to poverty.
“Poverty has not changed since the inception of the Scottish Attainment Challenge funding in 2015. Since then we have obviously made good use of this money to try and raise attainment but like everyone else the covid pandemic affected learning.
“We do know that children from poorer backgrounds were affected even more, but it now appears that the Scottish Government has changed the Scottish attainment challenge funding with a “stretched aim” and that simply means we are trying to get to a level when we had this extra funding.
“It is totally unacceptable. Has there been any feedback from the government on the representations the council has made to ensure we do receive the funding we need?”
Councillor McBride was informed that any feedback from the Scottish Government would be sent across to him offline.
The new attainment aims are expected to be achieved by December 2023.
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