Scottish Attainment Challenge - 2018-2022: equality impact assessment

Achievement of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) Level – Scottish Government Official Statistics Publication 14 December 2021

The closure of school buildings in March 2020 and January 2021 is likely to have had an impact on the CfE levels some children achieved in 2020/21. This should be kept in mind when interpreting these figures and, in particular, when comparing with figures for 2018/19 and before.

• The gap between the proportion of primary pupils (P1, P4 and P7 combined) from the most and least deprived areas who achieved their expected level in literacy has increased from 20.7 percentage points in 2018/19 to 24.7 percentage points in 2020/21.
• The gap between the proportion of primary pupils (P1, P4 and P7 combined) from the most and least deprived areas who achieved their expected level in numeracy increased from 16.8 percentage points in 2018/19 to 21.4 percentage points in 2020/21.
• For both primary literacy and primary numeracy the sizes of the gaps in 2020/21 were larger than at any previous point since 2016/17 (the first year for which comparable data is available).