The Scottish Attainment Challenge is about achieving equity in educational outcomes, with a particular focus on closing the poverty-related attainment gap. Equity can be achieved by ensuring every child has the same opportunity to succeed. The First Minister launched the Scottish Attainment Challenge in February 2015 to bring a greater sense of urgency and priority to this issue. It is underpinned by The National Improvement Framework, Curriculum for Excellence and Getting it Right for Every Child.

The Scottish Attainment Challenge provides focused and targeted improvement activity in literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing across Scotland. It also supports and complements a broad range of initiatives and programmes to ensure that all of Scotland’s children and young people reach their full potential.

In November 2021, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills announced plans for the Scottish Attainment Challenge (SAC) for 2022/23 to 2025/26. This aims to support recovery from the pandemic and accelerate progress in closing the gap.

About attainment

The Scottish Government’s ambition is for Scotland to be the best place to grow up. To achieve that we need to raise attainment and reduce educational inequity for all of Scotland’s children and young people.

Attainment is the measurable progress which children and young people make as they advance through and beyond school, and the development of the range of skills, knowledge and attributes needed to succeed in learning, life and work.

The attainment gap

The Scottish education system works well for most children and young people, who make good progress in their learning. However, there is still a gap between the progress which is made between those living in Scotland’s least and most deprived areas.

Many children and young people living in our most deprived communities do significantly worse at all levels of the education system than those from our least deprived communities. This is often referred to as the 'attainment gap'.

The attainment gap in Scotland is unacceptable. Tackling the attainment gap requires challenging everyone involved in Scottish education to relentlessly focus efforts on reducing the impacts of deprivation on educational outcomes.