Data on children and young people - Scotland
This page was updated on 6 February 2025 to remove a description of the Scottish Health and Wellbeing Census. The Scottish Government has now paused researcher access to the Health and Wellbeing Census until further notice pending the outcome of a review.
A suite of new and updated datasets covering education, and children and young people's wellbeing, have been made available in the ADR Scotland Safe Haven:
Achievement of Curriculum for Excellence levels dataset
This provides information on the performance of school pupils in literacy and numeracy. The data reports on pupils’ achievement of the expected Curriculum for Excellence level, based on teachers’ professional judgements. The data covers school years 2016/17 to 2021/22, for all Primary 1, Primary 4, Primary 7, and Secondary 3 pupils in publicly funded mainstream schools in Scotland. It also covers all pupils based in publicly funded special schools and units.
This dataset could be used to provide a measure of prior attainment in any education-related project in Scotland. As Scotland does not carry out formal standardised tests, such as the national curriculum key stage tests in England, this is the only dataset that can allow prior attainment to be considered. It could also be used to look at children’s progression through primary school and how this later impacts on school leavers’ qualifications. The dataset could be used to analyse how early absences in primary school affect both primary and secondary attainment levels.
From a methodological perspective - as these are teachers’ professional judgements on pupils’ achievements - this dataset could be used to look at the accuracy of teachers’ early judgements on pupils’ achievements, compared to their later educational attainment. This could enable exploration of the accuracy of these judgements, but also how they vary by factors such as race/ethnicity, gender, social class and poverty. The resulting research findings could then be used to identify opportunities to improve educational attainment, reduce bias based on equality group membership, and close the attainment gap.
