The Issue 

The places where our children and young people grow up in are extremely diverse and can greatly influence the outcomes of children and families across Scotland. Children and families can be negatively affected by a broad range of circumstances, including poverty and the associated impacts of it. Nonetheless, each place has their own unique context to consider when holistically assessing the relationship between child poverty and attainment and determining the actions required to mitigate the effects. Yet, the extent to which we can understand the impact of these place-based characteristics can be limited by the availability and density of data and information at hand. 

Why Does it Matter?  

Article 28 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that all children and young person have the right to an education. In addition, the UN Sustainable Development Goals have a target to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. 

Education and children services are in a unique position where they can work collaboratively across sectors to reduce structural inequalities and collaborate with a wide range of stakeholders to get it right for every child. This can be facilitated by having a deeper understanding of the mechanisms in which educational attainment can be negatively affected by poverty and subsequently support professionals to design bespoke interventions suitable to their own unique context and achieve excellence and equity of educational outcomes for children and young people.  

Our Project  

The aim of this collaboration is to determine what data sources and techniques best reflect the challenges of child poverty, and subsequently provide a means to assess the poverty related attainment gap as a result – which will further allow individual school settings, local authorities and other bodies to plan targeted interventions to reduce it.  

Developed through our Impact Collaborations process , this project has brought together academic expertise from the Fraser of Allander Institute at the University of Strathclyde and Glasgow Caledonian University, and data science expertise at Civic Data Lab and East Neuk Analytics. During this initial phase, the team will work in partnership with Northern Alliance and the Local Authorities they represent.  

The objective within this initial phase is to work with stakeholders to identify the shared knowledge gap across local authorities, identify the most appropriate indicators and map the suitable data sources that can be used at the school catchment aggregation.  

Our Outputs