1+2 languages policy: Findings from the 2024-25 survey of local authorities

2. Methodology

Questionnaires for schools asking quantitative and qualitative questions on progress in implementation and delivery of the 1+2 policy were sent to local authorities. Local authorities were responsible for collating their schools' answers before returning the aggregated responses to the Scottish Government. The 2024-25 session survey was issued on 2 May 2025 and returns were accepted until 15 July 2025.

Survey returns were received from 31 out of 32 local authorities with some local authorities providing partial returns i.e. some schools did not participate. This provided information collated from questionnaires completed by 1,657 mainstream primary, 320 mainstream secondary, and 73 special schools. This represents approx. 84% of mainstream primary, 89% of mainstream secondary, and 73% of special schools in Scotland. This is an increase in response rates compared to 2022-23 when approx. 79% of primary, 86% of secondary, and 50% of special schools answered the survey.

The set of questions sent to schools and local authorities have evolved over time to reflect the progress of our knowledge and understanding of the implementation of the policy in schools as well as to help minimise the impact on teachers' workload.

As a result, we do not have a statistical baseline that can be used to put these figures in context from the inception of the policy, but we are able to provide comparisons with the 2022-23 and 2020-21 survey results where questions were similar.

Unless otherwise stated, this paper uses percentages of the total number of schools that answered the survey for a particular question.

For example, 1,656 primary schools answered our question about L2 provision whilst 1,654 schools answered the questions about L3 delivery. This may differ from approaches used in previous reports where numbers of schools were used or where percentages were expressed as a percentage of the number of schools that answered the survey as a whole.

This approach addresses any bias arising due to changes in response rate over time and to facilitate comparisons with previous reports, where applicable, we have recalculated figures from previous years using this same approach. As such, figures from previous years contained in this paper may differ slightly from those published in the body of previous surveys and caution should be exercised when comparing results with previous surveys.