Mairi McAllan is now Scotland’s Education Secretary, but rewind just over a decade and she had just completed her Law degree, practicing as a solicitor at a well respected firm.

A person doesn’t just land there without elite academic performance - Ms McAllan is sharp as a tack and she knows what excellence looks like.

So it must have been all the more galling for her to have had to put her name to a ludicrous Scottish Government press release on Tuesday of this week, in response to the three-yearly PISA data on international school performance, from the OECD.

“Scotland significantly outperforms OECD average in four areas”, it screamed. It’s an A-Grade for creative writing, but the first half of the sentence is doing some enormously heavy lifting. It’s rather like saying that Scotland significantly outperformed Brazil in Miami for the first 10 seconds after winning the toss, whilst failing to mention that for the remaining 89 minutes and 50 seconds we got absolutely humped.

Ms McAllan, the following day, appeared before the Scottish Parliament’s Education Committee, essentially having to pretend that ‘artistic expression’, which that great misnomer Curriculum for Excellence emphasises and at which apparently we do rather well, is as important as maths, science and reading. Ms McAllan’s University of Glasgow law school most likely doesn’t agree. Nor, I imagine, do those parents who consider raising a good and rounded person to be their job, with the job of the teacher instead being to ensure that the offspring can do fractions.

GERS figures prove one thing - that Scotland needs full tax powers

C'mon, John - cut tax and let Scotland flourish - or will the SNP........

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