In a letter to the Holyrood education committee earlier this week, the Scottish government gave a brief update on the pilot project in Aberdeenshire exploring the use of free school meal data sharing:

Ensuring that we capture the right people with widening access to higher education policy is a priority for this Government. This includes working towards individual-level indicators of deprivation which are not based on an individual’s postcode. While we work to overcome barriers to sharing Free School Meal (FSM) data on a national scale, we are coordinating a data sharing pilot in the North-East of Scotland which will help us to better understand the potential impact of introducing such an indicator.

The pilot is being led by Aberdeen City Council, Aberdeenshire Council, Robert Gordon University and the University of Aberdeen and will allow data on FSM recipients in the two local authorities to be matched with live applications to the universities. Partners are currently finalising data sharing arrangements, with data sharing currently due to take place following the UCAS January deadline. Evaluation of the work is planned for later this year and we will use the findings to inform our approach to individual-level metrics.

The pilot has been running a while – we covered it here – and links back to the criticisms of the use of (area-based) SIMD data as the unique metric to assess the progress of fair access agenda. The committee’s short inquiry into widening access went over this last week.

If that all sounds promising, it’s worth contrasting the government’s hopes for evaluation of the project to inform further work with the pessimistic note in Robert Gordon University’s evidence to the committee (p. 52):

The data sharing issues experienced in the regional pilot illustrate the significant challenge in implementing data sharing arrangements nationally in the absence of legislation.

Higher education minister Graeme Dey had previously warned that fixing this all at a national-level would need legislation. He qualified this at the committee on Wednesday:

It had been thought at one point that it would only be through primary legislation. But we are trying to exhaust whether there are other possibilities that might allow us to do this. And I can’t go into too much detail at the moment.

And if that all sounds a bit vague, we didn’t really get much more detail from the minister about what exactly is standing in the way of free school meal data being shared across Scotland, and what steps would need to be taken to resolve this. After last week’s session, the committee was primed to explore this issue, as well as the possibility of implementing a unique learner number across Scotland’s education system. Dey did not provide much in the way of answers.

The typically excellent briefing from the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe) goes over in some depth how data on FSM eligibility is shared with UCAS in the rest of the UK, and the legal basis set out by the Welsh and Westminster governments for doing so. These are “not comparable set-ups” to Scotland’s, the committee was told.

If legislation did prove to be needed, Dey felt this would be unlikely to happen in the current parliament. Asked whether something could be appended to, for example, the Tertiary Education and Training Bill during its legislative passage, the minister didn’t sound keen.

Possibly we will get proper answers in the government response to the next fair access report, which will likely (again) recommend the need for non-area-based measures in tracking access. Last week the committee asked commissioner John McKendrick whether he would keep pushing for his role to be expanded to the whole tertiary system – when asked about this yesterday, the minister sounded a bit more open to the idea than might have been expected.

But overall it was a frustratingly detail-light hearing for anyone keen to understand why England and Wales can get FSM data-sharing to work and Scotland cannot. Perhaps mindful of the need to give the committee something, Dey did kick off his appearance with the announcement of a future consultation on part-time study (referencing the absence of this from current fair access targets) and support for disabled students.

It’s also probably worth remembering that free school meals data is not a silver bullet. Some timely research from the Education Policy Institute, out today, observes that in England many fewer children are FSM-registered than are estimated to be in poverty – and this under-registration is not evenly distributed across areas and pupil groups.