The SNP reduced education targets and hoped no one would notice

The Herald Scotland

15-05-2025

Earlier this week, The Herald exclusively revealed that the Scottish Government has slashed its own targets for 'closing the attainment gap'.
Unsurprisingly, they were far from upfront about doing so, and if I hadn't spent ten years investigating this issue I probably wouldn't have caught it either.
The first thing that grabbed my attention was a line in the new Programme for Government stating that the government hoped to cut the primary school attainment gap in literacy and numeracy by around 30% by 2026.
That might sound ambitious, but as soon as I saw it I went into my files to find a spreadsheet I've been updating for years, and it confirmed exactly what I suspected: this was in fact an absolutely massive downgrade on the government's ambitions.
Read more:
Scottish Government slashes targets for closing primary school attainment gap
You see, back in 2017, a couple of years after Nicola Sturgeon's infamous (and destructive) 'judge me on my record' speech, the government set very different targets. You've probably never seen them, and in fact very few people seem to even remember they ever existed. When I went to the government about all this, I even had to send the material to them because they didn't know about it!
The original target was to reduce the primary school attainment gap by more than 70 percent – and that was supposed to have been achieved in the current school year. The reality, as I'm sure you'll be shocked to find out, is that they haven't even come close.
Those aims were laid out in something called a National Improvement Framework, and the government's stated goal at that point was to get the gaps in literacy and numeracy down to just five percentage points. The new target of a 30 percent cut will leave gaps of 15 and 13 percentage points respectively.
And that's assuming they were going to meet that target, which they're not.
To make matters worse, the government have confirmed that the data showing whether or not this latest promise has been kept (stop laughing at the back) won't even be made available before the next Holyrood election, so none of you will actually have the opportunity to judge them on their record for closing the attainment gap.
That – like promising improvements while scrapping the measurement systems already in place and setting up new ones to put things back to year zero – is a nice trick, if you can get away with it.
In a sensible country with a properly functioning political system, all of this would be a major problem for First Minister John Swinney. That's not just down to the fact that he's now the man in charge, but also because he was in fact the Education Secretary back when those original targets were set, and oversaw an abject failure to even come moderately close to keep those promises.
And now, in the top job, he has decided that the best thing to do is to cut the targets by more than half and hope that nobody really notices what's going on.
What's more, he has recently been rebuked by the UK Statistic Authority because of the claims he has been making about the attainment gap, which – if we're being kind – have involved some incredibly selective use of statistics.
But there's no reason to expect an acknowledgement of any of this, and you certainly shouldn't be holding your breath for an apology.
Read more:
Lessons to Learn | Have we tried this novel idea that will close the attainment gap?
Instead, you should expect arrogance, because in truth that is what has underpinned the SNP's whole approach to this matter for a decade now.
Actually stop and think about it all for a minute.
We've had a full public education system for more than one hundred years in this country, the point of which is to narrow the gaps between rich and poor. Imagine what things would look like if we didn't have schools that were free at the point of use!
Within that system, we've had teachers spending their entire careers not just saying that they'll narrow those gaps, but actually doing something about it.
But apparently what we really needed was some passing interest from a few career politicians and their hand-picked advisers.
Nobody who knows a single thing about education ever thought that the SNP were going to eliminate or significantly close the attainment gap, because no matter how much politicians want simple solutions and focus-grouped rhetoric to solve complex problems, it just doesn't work that way.
Ministers and advisers either knew this and pressed on anyway (because they calculated that making promises would have a bigger political effect than failing to keep them) or they actually believed the claims that were being made (in which case, and I really do mean this, they're too stupid to be allowed anywhere near decision-making of any kind).
But it doesn't actually matter much at this stage which is correct, because the effect is the same: a decade of empty rhetoric, wasted money (approaching £2bn by the end of this parliament), and thousands upon thousands of families being let down at best and cynically exploited at worst.
So why, you might ask, are people like me even still paying attention to these targets? If they were always ridiculous (they were) and political in nature (absolutely), why keep asking questions and writing articles about them?
Because somebody has to be held accountable for all of this, and that has never, ever happened.
Nobody forced the SNP to make promises they would never, ever keep.
Nobody forced them to poison the well of education discourse in pursuit of a few percentage points in the polls.
Nobody forced them to crank up the pressure in classrooms to distract from political failures.
But we were told to judge them on their record.
You can get in touch with our education writers by email: