Nicola Sturgeon’s drive to get more children from deprived backgrounds into university is backfiring on pupils who feel “devalued” because they are not academically inclined, her hand-picked poverty adviser has warned.

Naomi Eisenstadt said the Scottish Government’s radical proposals for widening access to university mean schools are now under pressure to get pupils from disadvantaged families into higher education.

But youngsters from poor backgrounds told her that the best teachers tend to focus on the more able students and some, who are not suited to academia, have been left with “little support and advice”.

While Ms Eisenstadt said the SNP’s free university tuition policy is a “fantastic advantage for those who go on to higher education”, she highlighted deep spending cuts to Scotland’s colleges and urged ministers to get away from the perception that “the only thing we value is the academic route.”

The warnings were made in a report titled “The Life Chances of Young People in Scotland”, which concluded that the lives of children are still “largely determined” by the social class they are born into.