Innovation Fund doubled

Funding for innovative school projects to improve attainment has been more than doubled to £3.5 million, the Deputy First Minister John Swinney has confirmed today.

More than 400 schools across Scotland will benefit from 219 projects to improve attainment, specifically around literacy and numeracy.

The Innovation Fund, launched in January by the First Minister and originally set at £1.5 million, was set up to provide grants of up to £10,000 to schools for creative and innovative projects to improve attainment.

The Fund was open to all schools in Scotland that were not already benefitting from the Attainment Scotland Funding.

Speaking ahead of the publication of the Scottish Government’s Education Delivery Plan Mr Swinney said:

“The First Minister and I have been clear that our priority is to substantially close the attainment gap in the next five years. We have taken a number of actions to do this, including our £750 million Scottish Attainment Challenge which includes the Innovation Fund, and later today I will publish our new Education Delivery Plan which will set out in detail how we plan to close the attainment gap.

“We received hundreds of high quality applications for the Innovation Fund and as a result, we took the decision to double the funding available to reach as many children as possible.

“I’m pleased to see the creativity shown by schools and local authorities as the successful projects range from small ones in individual schools to large scale, cross authority projects. They cover a diverse range of issues across literacy, numeracy, health and wellbeing and span a broad age range.

“We know teachers are best placed to make decisions about their schools and the Innovation Fund has empowered them to take direct action to help improve the attainment of their pupils.”