Yes. North Ayrshire has, unfortunately, the second-highest level of child poverty in Scotland, behind Glasgow. I used to work in Glasgow as head of education there, so I have experience of the two highest levels of deprivation and child poverty in Scotland.
I firmly believe in partnership. I do not discount the evidence that you have just heard; it is really important and I want to come back to some of it later, if I can—specifically in relation to involvement of the police.
I firmly believe that our future is based in our children’s learning. Our teachers, our support staff and everybody who interacts with our young people are our most valuable resource. Therefore, we should be investing in them for the future.
In North Ayrshire we have set up the professional learning academy. It includes our most qualified and best teachers, and staff drawn from a number of agencies, including speech and language therapists, early years workers and psychologists. Their prime function is to increase the capacity of our schools and to work with our teachers on literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing strategies in the best possible way in order to get across what works.
The difference between the training at the professional learning academy and the training that I went to as a young teacher—which others may have experienced—is that in my training there was often very little follow-up. You went to something, you learned something and you may or may not have implemented it. The professional learning academy follows up the training: teachers go for training and staff development and it is followed up with coaching and mentoring so that they implement in the class the practice that they have learned. That is a key plank of our attainment challenge work, but it is not the only plank because we have work on nurture, on data analysis, on leadership and on family learning, and we have schools’ counselling initiatives. Rooted in that is work with partners from a range of agencies. What difference has all that made? It has made a huge difference.
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With over 50 per cent of our learners in SIMD 1 to 3, we have a significant challenge. We have evidence that we are closing the attainment gap without bringing the top down. That is equally important, because the easiest way to bring the attainment gap down is to forget about the top learners or high achievers. We are working with both: we work with the University of Glasgow in relation to our high achieving learners, on which I spoke at a conference last week.
Our targeted approaches have made a significant impact. I will give some figures. We have closed the gap in primary school literacy by 5.3 per cent, in secondary school literacy by 16.2 per cent, and by 14.1 per cent between SIMD 1 and 2 and those in SIMD 3 and 4. Numeracy has improved by 2 per cent, in respect of closing the gap between SIMD 1 and SIMD 3 and 4.
Soft analysis was mentioned earlier in respect of things that are difficult to measure. We have a nurture initiative that we brought from Glasgow City Council, which has made a significant investment in nurture. We have seen a 73 per cent improvement in the developmental strand and a 75 per cent improvement in the diagnostic strand. Of course, we must not forget the early years, where we have seen a 5 per cent improvement in individual learning in children in the early years in terms of their developmental milestones. There has been significant improvement.