Bringing Hope, Building Futures: Tackling child poverty delivery plan 2026-2031 – annex 6: Impact of policies on child poverty

Ensuring children and young people can reach their full potential

Through the Scottish Attainment Challenge, we aim to improve outcomes for children and young people impacted by poverty, with a focus on tackling the poverty related attainment gap. In addition, direct support is provided to families with the cost of living through our Free School Meals programme and funding for the School Clothing Grant.

Actions included

• Scottish Attainment Challenge (Continuation) - £200m
• Free School Meals, existing offer (Continuation) - £209.8m
• School Clothing Grant (Continuation) - £14.6m
• MCR Pathways expansion (Strengthened) - £1m
• Free School Meals expansion, Pension Credit/Administrative Earning Threshold (AET) (Strengthened) - £3m

Total investment in 2026/27 – £428.4m.

Impact of actions committed

Type of impact

These measures will have a mix of direct and indirect impacts. Closing the poverty-related attainment gap will have an indirect impact on child poverty rates by mitigating the consequences of poverty experiences. Direct support will be provided through Free School Meals, the School Clothing Grant and the Family Fund, which will reduce costs of living for families.

Potential size

Closing the poverty-related attainment gap aims to ensure that disadvantaged children can progress to positive destinations after school. This policy has the potential to enhance skills, qualifications and earning potential for children affected by poverty.

In terms of targeted policies, Free School Meals are saving families who take up the offer every day around £450 per child per year. The Primary 6 and 7 expansion aims to support an additional 25,000 pupils. In 2024/25, over 160,000 pupils received a School Clothing Grant.

Certainty

A wide range of evidence allows us to be certain that Scottish Attainment Challenge supports better awareness of equity issues, particularly in schools in deprived areas, implementation of approaches to narrow the poverty-related attainment gap in literacy and numeracy, and mitigates the impact of poverty on pupils’ life chances.

Wider evidence shows that Free School Meals and School Clothing Grants reduce the cost of the school day for those families who take up these offers.

Priority families targeted by the actions

Highly targeted policy action ensuring those living on low incomes benefit. Through the Scottish Attainment Challenge, support is targeted to children and young people who are socio-economically disadvantaged. Local Authorities and schools will continue to make local decisions on how best to support children and young people impacted by poverty, with targeted support also available for care experienced children and young people.

Free School Meals eligibility in Primary 6 upwards is based on benefit entitlement and School Clothing Grant eligibility is set by local authorities (it often follows Free School Meals eligibility), therefore supporting families in most need.

Tracking progress

A Framework for Recovery and Accelerating Progress helps provide clear direction to improve outcomes for those children and young people most impacted by poverty. The Evaluation Strategy clearly sets out how progress is measured (this will be updated for any future iteration of the Scottish Attainment Challenge from 2027/28 onwards), notably in the 2025 Attainment Scotland Fund Interim Report, assessing programme impact and implementation, as per the 16 National Improvement Framework measures of the attainment gap.

Local authorities annual returns include data on Free School Meals and clothing grant which allows us to monitor uptake of both policies; the impact on child poverty is not specifically monitored but is part of a wider assessment.