Scottish Attainment Challenge 2022 to 2023 - 2025 to 2026: equality impact assessment

The Refreshed Programme – Distribution of Funding

Recognising the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and poverty on children and young people in all local authorities across Scotland, and following a range of engagement with the education system and analysis of data; and in agreement with COSLA, £43 million in funding from the Attainment Scotland Fund (ASF) currently distributed to 9 local authorities with the highest concentrations of deprivation based on SIMD (Challenge Authorities) will, from 2022/23, be distributed to all 32 local authorities in the form of Strategic Equity Funding. The distribution of funding can be found on gov.scot and is based on the DWP/ HMRC Children in Low Income Families (CILIF) dataset.

This dataset is based on robust administrative data from Universal Credit and Tax Credits systems and provides a consistent definition of child poverty across the country. The method of allocation uses the 2019/20 relative low-income dataset, defined as children living in families with equivalised income of less than 60% of the UK median income before housing costs.

Challenge Authorities were selected based on the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD). Data from SIMD is valuable when it comes to identifying deprivation for particular places, such as in which small geographic areas deprivation is most concentrated. However, many children in poverty live outside of these areas. Where small pockets of low-income families live in less deprived geographic areas, using SIMD ranking alone to allocate funding will not provide sufficient support to these families. Using this place-based measure alone to allocate funding is particularly problematic for rural local authorities, where smaller settlement sizes mean geographic datazones are more likely to include a mix of households experiencing different levels of deprivation. Neither the Shetland Islands, Orkney Islands or Eilean Siar had any geographic areas in the most deprived quintile of SIMD areas, but together had around 2,000 children in poverty as shown by CILIF data.

By directly measuring household income at the individual level, CILIF data provides a precise count of deprived children and therefore effectively reflects the needs of individuals in each local authority. This contrasts to SIMD, which by design focuses on a geographic area’s overall deprivation relative to others, which does not always best represent need in rural communities.

From 2022/23, the focus of the SAC will be to reflect the needs of individuals in each local authority. CILIF data shows that, of 206,000 children in relative poverty before housing costs across Scotland in 2019/20, 122,000, or 59% lived outside of Challenge Authorities. When developing the refreshed SAC programme, there has been a conscious decision to move away from a funding model that recognises only a subset of child poverty across Scotland, to a model that provides every local authority with the funding they need to implement targeted programmes that benefit children living in poverty in their council areas.

The CILIF dataset has already been used in funding allocations for several Scottish Government policies, including School Clothing Grant, the Get in to Summer 2022 programme and the Parental Employment Support Fund. CILIF is also the main indicator of poverty used by SOLACE (LA Chief Executives) and the Improvement Service, as a measure of child poverty in their Community Outcomes Profile. CILIF is also a key indicator (often the headline measure of local child poverty) used by local community planning partnerships in developing their Local Child Poverty Action Reports.

The strategy for allocating, approving and monitoring funding is based on a number of broad principles including:

• Transparency: greater transparency of the costs associated with delivering the Attainment fund interventions to foster an open debate about relative priorities. Transparency will also help authorities and schools plan for delivery and build capacity in order to develop sustainability;
• Fairness: monies allocated in an equitable fashion so that authorities and schools receive a ‘fair share’ of central resources whilst rewarding innovation and ‘incentivising’ good practice;
• Alignment of Accountability: authorities and schools having a greater degree of accountability and alignment with the outcomes and benefits of the SAC programme;
• Clarity: greater clarity regarding the most appropriate funding approach for future interventions. This should help to ensure that all parties are signed up to funding a programme before resources are committed.

Alongside this, the Schools Programme, which distributed £7 million between 73 schools in 12 local authorities (outwith the 9 Challenge Authorities) will stop from 2022/23. Whilst this will see those schools receiving less funding directly than they currently do, their local authorities will benefit from access to SEF, whilst the schools will also continue to receive PEF. The £7 million will support the rising cost of PEF, which when first issued was £120 million and in 2022/23 will be £130.5 million. This change was made on the back of the engagement and analysis set out above and was also agreed by COSLA.

With these changes will be the introduction of a Framework for Recovery and Accelerating Progress (the Framework), which will see more consistent local planning, including the setting of locally identified stretch aims for progress toward the mission of the SAC. It also sets clear expectations for support and challenge at all levels of the system and for collaboration between local authorities and schools. Further, it recognises that the impacts of socio-economic disadvantage in relation to attainment and health and wellbeing cannot be tackled by education alone, and the Framework sets out a clear expectation that appropriate links are made between local authority and school improvement plans and other relevant plans such as Children’s Services Plans and Child Poverty Action Plans.

Accompanying the funding and the Framework will be a suite of guidance and support from the Scottish Government and Education Scotland.

The refreshed approach was announced by the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills on 23 November 2022. The refreshed programme will launch in April 2022.