Exam league tables celebrate high achieving schools. But Sandra Dick looks at schools in high deprivation areas may be the real success stories.

The rural landscape surrounding Doon Academy in Dalmellington is one of ­scattered cottages, gently sloping hills and seemingly random clumps of woodland.

Rural and hard-working, it’s an area rooted in getting hands dirty at the plough or at the pit. In years gone by, the East Ayrshire community thrived thanks to weaving and mining; its woollen mills sent yarn to Kilmarnock’s carpet manufacturers, its long-gone coal helped turn the wheels of industry.

Just over 50 miles separate the school and Glasgow’s affluent west end. It takes around an hour-and-a-half by car to get there.

And yet, says its headteacher Kenneth Reilly, many of Doon Academy’s 300 pupils have rarely visited Ayr, never mind ventured into the city. “We’re are probably as far away from Jordanhill as you can get,” he says.

A quick glance at this week’s annual school exam league tables might suggest that is the case. At Glasgow’s grant-aided Jordanhill School – the only state-funded secondary in Scotland not in council control – some 83% of pupils achieved five Highers or more, a slight rise on the previous year’s performance.

By comparison, Doon Academy appears to limp along with 26% of pupils achieving the “gold standard” of five or more Highers.

At face value, that could look like a mammoth gap. Yet Jordanhill has a zero ranking on the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) – in other words, it has no pupils from deprived backgrounds – while the other registers at 74%.

Indeed, when the achievements of schools which have 50% or more of their pupils from deprived backgrounds are taken into account, a picture emerges of dedicated teachers battling against the odds to nurture young people with lives blighted by poverty, giving up their spare time and developing ingenious methods to steer them towards success.

“We are not aiming to compete with Jordanhill,” stresses Reilly. “We are a small, rural school in an area blighted by mass redundancies and unemployment.

“But we sometimes feel that the tables don’t reflect the way children achieve and attain, because they achieve and attain in different ways.”

A Scottish Government report in December showed a startling gap in educational performance between rich and poor primary school pupils: just 59% of P7 children from the most deprived areas met the standard expected in literacy compared with 83% in the least deprived.

By the time children reach secondary school, a raft of additional problems linked to poverty – from low self-confidence to lack of expectation, over-crowding at home and lack of study space – come in to play to further erode young people’s chances of achievement.

The latest tables appear to further highlight the gap between rich and poor – Lochend Community High School, 10 miles away from Glasgow’s west end, has 95% of pupils living in deprivation and sits second bottom of the table with 8% of pupils attaining five or more Highers.

While Highers are on the table at Doon Academy, Reilly points out that the curriculum is wide and diverse to reflect a school in an area where not all are driven by a desire to go to university.

Instead, there are courses designed to meet the needs of local employers, while teachers are encouraged to spread their wings, shift away from ticking boxes and come up with inventive ways to inspire and enthuse pupils who may labour under difficult home lives.

Achievements in vocational studies which exploit the surrounding countryside – local lochs are used to help children achieve an angling qualification – cookery skills, and the vehicle parked in the school garage for budding mechanics to work on, are celebrated every bit as much as academic.

A major event in the school calendar are the trips to Glasgow to visit a bookshop, where children taste city life and discover a setting youngsters from more urban and affluent families might take for granted.

“Staff have to have skills that are wide-ranging and be willing to diversity,” adds Reilly. “Very often we have pupils who don’t believe in themselves, they don’t have the self-confidence or resilience that others might.”

According to the exam tables, at Castlemilk High School, where 82% of pupils are from deprived backgrounds, 26% achieved five or more Highers, slightly above its 25% benchmark.

Headteacher Lynn McPhillips says the school has a strong focus on outdoor team-building initiatives to help build confidence and resilience.

“We provide a wider curriculum," she says. "We offer a range of wide achievement opportunities including skiing, rock climbing and cookery classes. We provide leadership opportunities for all and actively promote skills development.

“There are many opportunities for learning engagement beyond the school day. All young people go on a trip to our croft in Gairloch for one week where they are actively engaged in team-building activities and outdoor learning.

“We also offer trips to the theatre, Saturday clubs, study support and study weekends.”

Coaching and mentoring sessions promote resilience and build confidence, she adds, and the school day is "poverty-proofed" so every child has what they need to get through the day.

Susan Quinn, education convener at the EIS trade union, said the exam league tables show just one side of educational achievement.

“There’s more to attainment and achievement in education than Higher results. League tables are not helpful – they don’t address everything. We should be celebrating schools in the round, looking at everything they do.”

She added that many schools – particularly in Glasgow – have seen a significant increase in outcomes with positive destinations for young people at the end of their education such as foundation apprenticeships. Not all achievements, she adds, are linked to Higher results.

“We have young people dealing with incredible poverty within their family circumstances, where parents are making hard decisions around how the money is spent, whether or not to put on the heating or whether they can provide the appropriate support for their children.

“Young people might be carers and there may be historic issues around expectations of a family on what can be achieved.

“They might have to find work to support the family or themselves and that takes them away from studying, and there are issues around general overcrowding in homes and having the right environment to study,” she added.

John Swinney, Deputy First Minister, said: “For far too long, Scotland has seen a cycle of deprivation which has had an effect on educational attainment. Our mission is to break that cycle and ensure that poverty is no longer destiny.

“National figures published last month show that real progress in being made to ensure that education becomes the real route out of poverty that children need, breaking the deprivation cycle once and for all. “That’s why through the Scottish Attainment Challenge we are investing hundreds of millions of pounds to give schools the resources to choose where to target support and interventions and decide what will make a real difference to their communities.

“Empowered teachers, given the right resources and appropriate support, are making a massive difference in our classrooms and are transforming lives.

“We know there is more to do to raise attainment and ensure all our young people have the best chance to build the knowledge, skills and confidence they need to succeed.”

*How we worked it out

To devise our alternative league table, we took the following steps.

First, we identified every school which had an SIMD value of less than 50, and then removed them – leaving us with a list of schools where 50% or more pupils came from deprived backgrounds.

Then we took this new list, and ranked the schools by the number of pupils who achieved five Highers or more.

While it is a crude illustration, our alternative list does show that young people don’t have to live in an affluent area to achieve great things at school.