National Improvement Framework 2026

Introduction

The Standards in Scotland's Schools etc. Act 2000 (as amended by the Education (Scotland) Act 2016) requires Scottish Ministers to produce a National Improvement Framework (NIF) for Scottish education, to be published and reviewed annually, to support delivery of a duty on Ministers and local authorities to secure improvement in the quality of school education, and to reduce the poverty-related attainment gap.

The 2026 NIF is informed by discussions with stakeholders, including local government, headteachers, professional associations, parents and carers, and young people.

Local authorities in Scotland play a crucial role in supporting schools to deliver high-quality education, ensuring that all children and young people can achieve their potential. In March 2025, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education in Scotland (HMIE) published a thematic inspection of local authority approaches to supporting school improvement. The report highlighted both the strengths and areas that need to improve in how local authorities fulfil this role, particularly in relation to self-evaluation, improvement planning, quality assurance, and professional learning.

Schools, ELC settings, and local authorities have a long history of improvement planning, using self-evaluation to identify areas of strength and priorities for improvement. Schools use How good is our school? to promote effective self-evaluation as the first important stage in a process of achieving self-improvement. How Good Is Our Education Authority? is a framework that has been developed by ADES and Education Scotland to support self-evaluation within local authorities and which allows for collaborative working across groups of local authorities to identify strengths and support areas for improvement. The use of How Good Is Our Education Authority? aims to promote partnership working, collaboration and greater consistency to ensure that we achieve sustainable improvements for all children, young people.

This approach to self-evaluation includes support and challenge from peers across the system, including Education Scotland and HMIE. These external participants provide a degree of scrutiny and challenge in relation to the self-evaluations and the subsequent discussions. From this work, priorities for improvement have been identified and action plans developed.

The local authority plans and the priorities they set out, alongside the collaborative improvement work, have been instrumental in shaping the content and context of this NIF and the associated Improvement Plan. The prioritising, targeting and implementation of local improvement activity is key to the delivery of the NIF vision and priorities. In turn, local authorities and schools should take account of the NIF and the national plan, when developing their own improvement plans.