Closing Scotland’s attainment gap is wrongly focused on making education “simpler and easier” for pupils instead of promoting hard work, a former SNP minister has said.
Addressing the difference in attainment between rich and poor pupils has been a key policy of the SNP government, with Nicola Sturgeon, the former first minister, pledging to eliminate the education gap in 2016.
However, progress has been slow, with the latest data for Primary 1 pupils showing that the difference has increased slightly across reading, writing, listening and talking, and literacy and numeracy between 2016-17 and 2021-22.
