A Scoping Study on Data and Information that Describes Poverty and Educational Attainment

In Scotland, measures of educational attainment commonly use the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD). The 'attainment gap' measures the difference in attainment between SIMD quintile one and SIMD quintile five (representing the least and most deprived areas respectively). Education practitioners in the Northern Alliance RIC describe using the SIMD to analyse the poverty-related attainment gap as problematic, particularly in rural areas. This is due to both the large geographical areas that SIMD relates to in rural areas and the relevance of the information captured within the measure. The Northern Alliance Regional Improvement Collaborative has initiated this scoping study to look at other data and information that could help local authorities and schools better understand how poverty and deprivation affect educational attainment. This report looks across a wide range of data, some of which are rural specific, to scope out alternative evidence that could be used by schools and local authorities to identify issues that may be impacting attainment. A range of data sources are identified for further analysis. An accompanying report presents a framework for looking at the correlation between indicators of poverty and educational attainment. The next stage of the analysis will involve analysing the data further for checks on robustness and coverage and then using our framework to analyse their predictive power in terms of attainment