Summary Statistics for Attainment and Initial Leaver Destinations, No. 8: 2026 edition

Section 1. About these statistics

This section provides an overview of the data sources, concepts and methodology associated with the data used in this publication. For more information, please refer to the Summary Statistics for Attainment and Initial Leaver Destinations - Data Sources and Methodology document.

Section 1.1 School leavers

In this publication a school leaver is defined as a young person of school leaving age, who left during or at the end of the school year. For 2024-25 school leavers, the leaver year is 11th September 2024 to 9th September 2025.

For most young people, S4 (≈15 to 16-year-olds) is the last compulsory year of school, but the majority choose to stay on and complete S5 (≈16 to 17-year-olds) and S6 (≈17 to 18-year-olds). Please note pupil ages are based on approximate age ranges; more information is available from the pupil census supplementary statistics.

Figures in this report are based on pupils in publicly funded mainstream schools, in the 32 local authorities and one grant aided school. Figures including school leavers from publicly funded special schools are available for initial destinations and for the National Qualifications attainment measure in Supplementary Tables L3.1, N3.1, N3.2, Z2.1a and Z2.1b.

Section 1.2 School leaver initial destinations

This publication provides information on the initial destinations of 2024-25 school leavers from all stages of secondary school, relating to outcomes approximately three months after the end of the school year (6th October 2025).

A separate publication - ‘Summary Statistics for Follow-up Leaver Destinations’ – will follow in June 2026 and will provide information on the follow-up destinations of 2024-25 school leavers, approximately nine months after the end of the school year (6th April 2026).

School leaver destinations data is based on the Skills Development Scotland (SDS) ‘Opportunities for All’ shared dataset, matched with pupil census records for the school year 2024-25. More information can be found in Section 1 of the Methodology document.

Destinations are grouped into two categories within this publication, Positive Destinations and Other Destinations.

Positive Destinations includes:

• Higher Education
• Further Education
• Employment
• Training
• Voluntary Work
• Personal Skills Development

The Other Destination category includes:

• Unemployed Seeking
• Unemployed Not Seeking
• Unknown

Section 1.3 School leaver attainment

In this publication, school leaver attainment statistics are presented for two different measures: the National Qualifications measure and All SCQF measure.

This report makes numerous references to qualifications awarded by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA). The SQA was replaced by Qualifications Scotland (QS) in February 2026. As the statistics in this report relate to attainment in the period when the SQA was the awarding body, we have retained the references to SQA when describing the statistics.

The National Qualifications measure presents leavers’ attainment in National Qualifications only. National Qualifications are awarded by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) and include the National Courses (National 3, National 4, National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher) and Skills for Work. This is the measure which has been presented in all previous versions of this publication. More information is included in Section 2 of the Methodology document.

The All SCQF measure was introduced in 2024. It covers school leavers’ attainment in:

• qualifications included in the National Qualifications measure
• additional qualifications awarded by the SQA
• qualifications and learning programmes from a range of other providers.

Further information on this measure is provided in Section 3 of the Methodology document.

For a comparison of the attainment included in the National Qualification and All SCQF measures see Table 1.

Table 1: Qualifications included in the National Qualifications and All SCQF attainment measures

For both measures, the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF) is used as the basis for reporting levels of attainment. The SCQF is Scotland’s national qualifications framework which allows broad comparisons to be made between qualifications. The SCQF Level indicates the level of difficulty of a particular qualification or learning programme. It allows learners, employers and the public in general, to understand the range of skills and learning that should be achieved at each Level.

For both the National Qualifications measure and the All SCQF measure this publication reports the highest SCQF Level achieved as well as the number of passes or awards attained at a given SCQF Level or better at SCQF Levels 3 to 7. For the All SCQF measure, we report the proportion of leavers achieving five or more qualifications at a given SCQF Level (or better), whereas for National Qualifications we report the proportion achieving one or more.

The use of a five or more threshold for the All SCQF measure is directly linked to the wider range of qualifications it includes. These qualifications can vary substantially in the number of SCQF credit points (notional learning hours) they carry. Setting the threshold at five or more helps to reduce the influence of shorter, low‑credit qualifications on the figures and provides a more balanced picture of attainment. This approach was agreed following engagement with stakeholders in the process of developing the 2026 improvement plan for of the National Improvement Framework. For more details see Section 4.2 of the Methodology document published alongside this report.

Figure 1: Examples of qualifications attained by school leavers, and how that attainment is counted under the two measures

For a more detailed discussion of the difference between the National Qualifications measure and the All SCQF measure, please refer to Section 4 of the Methodology document.

Which measure of school leaver attainment should I use?

Use the National Qualifications measure of attainment when:

• You want to consider school leavers’ attainment in the SQA’s National Qualifications. These are the National Courses (e.g. National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher) and Skills for Work.
• You want to compare to the three school leaver attainment measures included amongst the 16 National Improvement Framework key measures of the poverty-related attainment gap, which also use the National Qualifications measure.
• You want to consider school leavers’ attainment in qualifications where all the qualifications at a given SCQF Level have the same number of SCQF credit points (notional learning hours).

Use the All SCQF measure of attainment when:

• You want to capture school leavers’ attainment across the full range of qualifications and learning programmes recognised on the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework.
• You want to compare to the three school leaver attainment measures included amongst the 16 National Improvement Framework key measures of the poverty-related attainment gap which also use the All SCQF measure.
• You want to consider the Scottish Attainment Challenge local stretch aims for 2023/24 to 2025/26 set by local authorities.
• You want to consider school leavers’ attainment, aligned to what is available on the Insight tool (used by education professionals in Scotland) and the public Secondary School Information Dashboard.

Section 1.4 Impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on these statistics

Data for some years in this publication is affected by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The statistics in this publication provide an accurate reflection of school leavers’ initial destinations and attainment in each of the years included. But the effects of the pandemic should be kept in mind when making comparisons over time. This applies when considering any changes in the data between 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23, and between these years and previous years. For this reason, for this edition we have included the 2018-19 data in all time series charts to allow for comparison to pre-pandemic levels.

For attainment tables and charts, we have placed a dashed line break in the series between 2018-19 and 2019-20 to highlight where changes in how qualifications were assessed and graded in the years 2020 to 2023. Care must be taken when comparing attainment of school leavers in 2018-19 and before, with that of school leavers in 2019-20 to 2022-23. Any interpretation of changes must take full account of the different certification methods used in different years, and changes in the attainment levels in 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23 should not be seen as an indication that performance has improved or worsened, without further evidence.

For more information, see Section 6 of the the Methodology document published alongside this report.