Chamber and committees

Improving outcomes for young people through school education: Follow-up information

Letter to the Convener from Stephen Boyle, the Auditor General for Scotland, 27 October 2021

Dear Richard

Further to the evidence session with the Scottish Government on 30 September on Improving outcomes for young people through school education, I agreed to provide the Committee with some further information.

Spend per pupil

Colin Beattie asked if we could strip out elements of the spending per pupil costs that are not directly related to attainment, such as PPP/PFI contract costs, in order to provide a figure common to every pupil which can then be used for comparison.

The spend per pupil data that we used in the report is calculated each year by the Improvement Service as part of the Local Government Benchmarking Framework. The data is collected on the same basis as the Local Financial Returns (LFRs) provided to the Scottish Government, although the data is returned separately to the Improvement Service.

The Scottish Government publishes the workbooks from the LFRs, and while this gives a breakdown of total spend on school education for all councils, not all areas of spend are broken down in a way which would allow us to remove all non-direct costs. We have therefore calculated a spend per pupil figure based solely on what councils spend on staff in schools (teaching and non-teaching). Across Scotland this accounted for around 70% of total council spending on school education in 2018/19. We have removed spend on support services in line with how the Improvement Service calculates spend. When comparing this data across councils, it’s important to note that a variety of factors will affect how much councils spend on staff, such as staff length of service and local geography.

The attached workbook shows the figures for each council. The revised spend per pupil figure is in column J. The third tab in the spreadsheet shows that, as with the overall spend per pupil figure, spend on staff per pupil is not correlated with academic attainment. We have used 2018/19 figures as this was the last year when attainment data was not affected by Covid-19.

For information, the Improvement Service publish a report every year which goes into more detail about the factors which affect cost per pupil. In 2018 it published a thematic report about indicators relating to children and young people which looks at these factors in more detail.

College leaver destinations

Sharon Dowey asked if outcomes are looked at to see if pupils are getting jobs after they have finished college courses. College leaver destinations is one of the core national measures reported on as part of colleges’ Outcome Agreements with the Scottish Funding Council (SFC). It measures the number and proportion of full-time college qualifiers moving to post-college destinations (work, study at university, unemployed or unavailable for work) 3-6 months after qualifying. The definition of a ‘positive destination’ for a college leaver is either gaining employment or enrolling to study at university.

The SFC publishes data each year on college leaver destinations. The most recent publication, on 2018-19, was published in November 2020. The next set of data, for 2019-20, is expected to be published in the next month or so. The November 2020 report states that 87.8% of those who left college in 2018-19 having qualified, and whose status is known, moved to a positive destination. 12.2% of these leavers moved to a negative destination. Moving into work accounted for 47.9% of the positive destinations, with the remainder of students with a positive destination moving to university.

We last reported on positive destinations in Scotland's colleges 2019 which we published in June 2019.

I hope that members find this additional information helpful.

With best wishes
Stephen Boyle Auditor General for Scotland

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