SNP ministers tried to censor a report that found Nicola Sturgeon had failed to raise education standards and pressured a watchdog to say there had been “significant” improvement.
One of the first minister’s core pledges was to close the attainment gap between rich and poor children by the time she stood for re-election last May.
Three months before the election Audit Scotland, a spending watchdog, found that “the poverty-related attainment gap remains wide” and “progress has been limited”.
Stephen Boyle, the auditor-general, said that Sturgeon had been well behind target before the pandemic, which had further slowed progress.
It has now emerged that Scottish ministers wrote to Boyle before the report was published, raising concerns about the “factual accuracy” of his findings. Boyle was told in a letter obtained by The Times after a freedom of information request that his report was inconsistent and had ignored government achievements.
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Ministers demanded that the conclusion that progress had been “limited” be replaced with their own claim that there had been “significant” improvement. Boyle was also told to provide evidence to support his “subjective” finding that the gap between rich and poor remained wide. He refused to withdraw his conclusion and it was published in the final report.
Oliver Mundell, the education spokesman for the Scottish Conservatives, said: “This situation would be tragic if it wasn’t so serious for our children’s future.
“Rather than improving the attainment gap, the SNP have been left humiliated and forced to beg for facesaving changes to such a critical report.
“This isn’t a sign of how any good government would operate and is yet another sign of the secrecy culture that is endemic within the SNP.”
Paul Johnston, the government director-general for education, wrote in the letter that the report was “not consistent in its approach to academic achievement, and gives insufficient attention to wider education outcomes”.
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The report said that the “poverty-related attainment gap had narrowed slightly”, by about 5 percentage points, between rich and poor pupils achieving at least five National 5 qualifications.
Johnston said: “We question the assertion that the rate of improvement has been ‘limited’ since 2013-14 . . . we believe that [5 percentage points] is significant rather than ‘slight’. ”
He said the finding that the gap was “wide” was “subjective” and “without a frame of reference”.
Ministers successfully removed one part of the report, which found that attempts to mitigate the harm caused by school closures in the pandemic had been “less effective among pupils living in very challenging circumstances”.
Another report on education, by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), was amended to play down a “lack of transparency” and “confusion” at all levels of the education system.
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The OECD originally reported a “decline in maths and science” standards, but this was changed in the final report to say standards “remained stable”, in line with ministers’ claims that standards had not slipped far enough to constitute a decline.
Willie Rennie, the Scottish Liberal Democrat education spokesman, said: “We knew ministers had built in months of meddling time for the OECD report but now we discover they were at it with the auditor-general too.
“SNP ministers promised to close the poverty-related attainment gap completely but the gap is still huge. In that context this improvement is infinitesimal and certainly isn’t significant.”
