HEADTEACHERS are “anxious” over their responsibility to ensure a multi-million initiative to tackle educational inequality is spent wisely, a minister has said.

John Swinney, the Education Secretary, also stressed school leaders were excited about the possibilities of the £120 million Pupil Equity Fund (PEF).

The fund, which was launched earlier this year, has seen some schools with high proportions of disadvantaged pupils receive hundreds of thousands of pounds in additional funding.

A condition of the fund is that headteachers rather than councils decide what it should be spent on, but they also have to prove the initiative has had an impact.

Mr Swinney told the summer conference of School Leaders Scotland, which represents secondary headteachers, that he had spoken about the fund at a number of briefing events across Scotland.

He said: “If I characterize the mood of those events there was a mixture of excitement and anxiety.

“Excitement about the opportunity of having significant resources at the control of headteachers and within schools to decide what was right for the young people they were supporting, but anxiety of wanting to make sure they would get it right and that they would use the money wisely to benefit young people.”

Mr Swinney said the PEF was about empowering schools to be more influential in deciding what pupils needed.

Stephen Miller, president of SLS, said heightened anxiety centred on the requirement to show the fund was helping to close the attainment gap between rich and poor.

He said: “I think the greater anxiety is not necessarily about the money that has to be spent, but about the ability to evidence improvement in a very short time scale.

“For many schools improvement will be about a generational improvement and where there is concern I think that is the biggest anxiety.”

Graeme Logan, strategic director at schools body Education Scotland, told the conference that money should not be spent on a “shopping list” of new equipment.

Mr Logan said: “We have attainment advisers who are working to make sure schools go through a process before they spend the money and if headteachers find themselves leafing through catalogues thinking what they are going to buy then something has gone wrong.

“It should not be just about buying tablet computers or other bits of shiny new kit because we know that sort of thing has the least transformative impact.

“Headteachers need to think very carefully about what barriers to learning particular children face, what the data is telling them about children’s progress and then engage with teachers, parents and the wider community so there is a democratic process to this.”

Maureen McKenna, Glasgow’s top education official, has already warned about “snake oil salesmen” inundating schools with requests.

She said headteachers in the city, which received £21m in PEF funding, should be wary of people saying: “I can fix your literacy problems, just give me a huge wad of money”.

THE Pupil Equity Fund (PEF) is a £120 million scheme to target resources at pupils from poorer backgrounds.

Under the initiative money is allocated directly to schools with headteachers tasked with deciding how to spend it.

Schools receive £1,200 for each pupil from P1-S3 eligible for free school meals – a key indicator of poverty.

A key principle of the fund set out by the Scottish Government is that headteachers “must have access to the full amount”.

Another key principle is that it must enable schools to deliver activities which are “clearly additional to those which were already planned”.

Schools will have to demonstrate the difference the funding has made to children

affected by poverty.

Headteachers will be accountable to their local authority for these decisions and they will also have to report on progress to parent bodies.

The Scottish Government argues the fund will help transform school education by shifting power away from councils to headteachers. Ministers argue that allows decisions to be taken by those who know pupils best.

However, Reform Scotland has criticised the fund arguing detailed guidance about how it should be spent is “inconsistent with empowerment".

There have also been tensions between councils and headteachers because of a wider climate of cuts in education budgets.

Some local authorities have questioned the logic of a new funding stream to pay for extra measures when vital support services have had to be cut.

North Lanarkshire Council was threatened with losing £8.8m of its PEF funding after demanding headteachers use £1m to pay for existing classroom assistants in breach of the guidance.

However, in other areas schools have agreed to give some of the money to councils because they rely on them for central services such as human resources to appoint extra staff.

Inspectors from Education Scotland will begin visiting schools from September this year to discuss what plans have been adopted and begin evaluating what works.