MONEY earmarked to improve the education of children from deprived backgrounds is being used to shore up local authority education budgets, it has been claimed.

Analysis of how the £120 million Pupil Equity Fund (PEF) is being used found that it is being used to compensate for cuts to schools budgets.
One teacher said that the net effect of the scheme amounted to "nothing", according to a report by the Times Education Supplement, while others have said that it is not providing "added value".

Recently-retired primary teacher George Gilchrist said there was a mixed picture with PEF funding, with some councils using it to plug gaps while others protected it to fund targeted strategies such as breakfast clubs and extracurricular activities.

Seumus Searson, general secretary of the Scottish Secondary School Teachers Association said that PEF was often "shoring up what has been lost."

He added: "This is no a cherry on the top, it's plugging gaps".
The claims come after it was reported that Glasgow wanted to use the money to pay for janitors, while North Lanarkshire intended 15 per cent of its allocation to be used to fund classroom assistants.

Eleanor Coner, partnership development officer at the Parent Teacher Council said: "We are starting to gather all sorts of stories about PEF.
"Many schools do seem to be spending the money on staff - family-learning workers, family-link workers, etc. One could question whether this is added value as this service was certainly hit by budget cuts."

Labour education spokesperson Iain Gray said that the current situation is a "farce", and that the SNP should reverse cuts to local authority budgets instead.

Mr Gray said: “It was Labour who led the debate on targeted spending to close the attainment gap, but the SNP approach has been to introduce it while slashing core education budgets. It is a farcical state of affairs.

“Labour’s proposal for the Pupil Equity Fund would have been paid for by a 50p top rate of tax on the richest, ensuring the funding was genuinely additional, instead the SNP have just shifted money around already shrinking core budgets.

“Instead of following Labour’s lead and using the powers of the Scottish Parliament to invest in education, the SNP has stripped £1.5billion out of local services since 2011.

“It is unacceptable that cash meant to lift the poorest pupils up is being spent plugging gaps in budgets. The only way to fix this is to stop the cuts and invest in core education budgets, while maintaining PEF as additional funding. “

The Scottish government advises that PEF "must enable schools to provide interventions, staffing or resources that are clearly additional to those already planned."

A spokeswoman said: "Any school plans for using this funding must also be grounded in evidence of what is known to be effective at closing the poverty-related attainment gap."

A spokesman for COSLA, the local authority umbrella body, said that budget decisions were a matter for individual councils.