Wednesday, December 13, 2017

The School Gap

The gap in educational performance between rich and poor pupils in Scotland gets wider as they progress through primary school, official data has revealed.

By the time they reach P7 wealthier children have pulled further ahead of their poorer peers in basic skills such as reading, writing and numeracy.

The annual school figures show that poorer pupils are still struggling to keep up.

The 2016-17 statistics, based on teachers’ judgements, show that the gap in numeracy skills between the richest and poorest pupils widens from 14% in P1 to 20% in P7. In reading the gap increases from 17% to 20% over the same period, while, in writing it widens from 18% to 22% and in listening and talking from 12%  to 17%.


The number of teachers in Scotland has risen by 543 in the space of a year, now standing at 51,513. However, the number of pupils has also risen to 688,959, meaning that the ratio of pupils to teachers has fallen slightly to 13.6, with the average class size remaining static at 23.5.



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