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Earlier this week, The Herald exclusively revealed that the Scottish Government has slashed its own targets for ‘closing the attainment gap’.

Unsurprisingly, they were far from upfront about doing so, and if I hadn’t spent ten years investigating this issue I probably wouldn’t have caught it either.

The first thing that grabbed my attention was a line in the new Programme for Government stating that the government hoped to cut the primary school attainment gap in literacy and numeracy by around 30% by 2026.

That might sound ambitious, but as soon as I saw it I went into my files to find a spreadsheet I’ve been updating for years, and it confirmed exactly what I suspected: this was in fact an absolutely massive downgrade on the government’s ambitions.

Scottish Government slashes targets for closing primary school attainment gap

You see, back in 2017, a couple of years after Nicola Sturgeon’s infamous (and destructive) ‘judge me on my record’ speech, the government set very different targets. You’ve probably never seen them, and in fact very few people seem to even remember they ever existed. When I went to the government about all this, I even had to send the material to them because they didn’t know about it!

The original target was to reduce the........

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