Summary Statistics for Attainment and Initial Leaver Destinations, No. 7: 2025 edition

Section 1. About these statistics

This section provides an overview of the data sources, concepts and methodology associated with the data used in this publication. For more information, please refer to the Summary Statistics for Attainment and Initial Leaver Destinations - Data Sources and Methodology document.

Section 1.1 School leavers

In this publication a school leaver is defined as a young person of school leaving age, who left during or at the end of the school year. For 2023-24 school leavers, the leaver year is 13th September 2023 to 11th September 2024.

For most young people, S4 (≈15-16 year-olds) is the last compulsory year of school, but the majority choose to stay on and complete S5 (≈16-17 year-olds) and S6 (≈17-18 year-olds). (Please note pupil ages are based on approximate age ranges; more information is available from the pupil census supplementary statistics.)

Figures in this report are based on pupils in publicly funded mainstream schools, in the 32 local authorities and one grant aided school. Figures including school leavers from publicly funded special schools are available for initial destinations and for the National Qualifications attainment measure in Supplementary Tables L3.1, N3.1, N3.2, Z2.1a and Z2.1b.

Section 1.2 School leaver initial destinations

This publication provides information on the initial destinations of 2023-24 school leavers from all stages of secondary school, relating to outcomes approximately three months after the end of the school year (7th October 2024).

A separate publication - ‘Summary Statistics for Follow-up Leaver Destinations’ – will follow in June 2025 and will provide information on the follow-up destinations of 2023-24 school leavers, approximately nine months after the end of the school year (7th April 2025).

School leaver destinations data is based on the Skills Development Scotland (SDS) ‘Opportunities for All’ shared dataset, matched with pupil census records for the school year 2023-24. More information can be found in Section 1 of the Methodology document.

Destinations are grouped into two categories within this publication, Positive Destinations and Other Destinations.

Positive Destinations includes:

• Higher Education
• Further Education
• Employment
• Training
• Voluntary Work
• Personal Skills Development

The Other Destination category includes:

• Unemployed Seeking
• Unemployed Not Seeking
• Unknown

Section 1.3 School leaver attainment

In this publication, school leaver attainment statistics are presented for two different measures.

The first measure presents leavers’ attainment in National Qualifications only. National Qualifications are awarded by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) and, for the purposes of this publication, are the National Courses (National 3, National 4, National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher) and Skills for Work. This is the measure which has been presented in all previous versions of this publication. More information is included in Section 2 of the Methodology document.

The second measure, referred to as the All SCQF measure, was included in this publication for the first time last year. It covers school leavers’ attainment from:

• qualifications included in the National Qualifications measure
• additional qualifications awarded by the SQA
• qualifications and learning programmes, from a range of other providers. Further information on this measure is provided in Section 3 of the Methodology document.

For a comparison of the attainment included in the National Qualification and All SCQF measures see Table 1.

Table 1: Qualifications included in the National Qualifications and All SCQF attainment measures

For both measures, the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF) is used as the basis for reporting levels of attainment. The SCQF is Scotland’s national qualifications framework which allows broad comparisons to be made between qualifications. The SCQF level indicates the level of difficulty of a particular qualification or learning programme. It allows learners, employers and the public in general, to understand the range of skills and learning that should be achieved at each level.

For both the National Qualifications measure and the All SCQF measure this publication reports the number of passes or awards attained at a given SCQF level or better and the highest SCQF level achieved, at SCQF Levels 3 to 7.

Figure 1: Examples of qualifications attained by school leavers, and how that attainment is counted under the two measures

For a more detailed discussion of the difference between the National Qualifications measure and the All SCQF measure, please refer to Section 4 of the Methodology document.

Which measure of school leaver attainment should I use?

Use the National Qualifications measure of attainment when:

• You want to consider school leavers’ attainment in the SQA’s National Qualifications. These are the National Courses – e.g. National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher – and Skills for Work.
• You want to compare to the three school leaver attainment measures included amongst the 13 National Improvement Framework key measures of the poverty-related attainment gap.
• You want to consider school leavers’ attainment in qualifications where all the qualifications counted at a given SCQF level have the same number of SCQF credit points associated with them.

Use the All SCQF measure of attainment when:

• You want to consider school leavers’ attainment in all courses on the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework.
• You want to consider the Scottish Attainment Challenge local stretch aims for 2023/24 to 2025/26 set by local authorities.
• You want to consider school leavers’ attainment, aligned to what is available on the Insight tool (used by education professionals in Scotland) and the public Secondary School Information Dashboard.

If using the All SCQF measure, it should be understood that not all courses at a given SCQF Level will be associated with the same numbers of credit points (notional learning hours). See Section 4.4 of the Methodology document published alongside this report.

Section 1.4 Impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on these statistics

Data for some years in this publication is affected by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The statistics in this publication provide an accurate reflection of school leavers’ initial destinations and attainment in each of the years included. But the effects of the pandemic should be kept in mind when making comparisons over time. This applies when considering any changes in the data between 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23, and between these years and previous years. For this reason, for this edition we have included the 2018-19 data in all time series charts to allow for comparison to pre-pandemic levels.

For attainment tables and charts, we have placed a dashed line break in the series between 2018-19 and 2019-20 to highlight where changes in how qualifications were assessed and graded in the years 2020 to 2023. Care must be taken when comparing attainment of school leavers in 2018-19 and before, with that of school leavers in 2019-20 to 2022-23. Any interpretation of changes must take full account of the different certification methods used in different years, and changes in the attainment levels in 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23 should not be seen as an indication that performance has improved or worsened, without further evidence.

For more information, see Section 6 of the the Methodology document published alongside this report.