There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to Scotland’s schools.

It shouldn't take an American expat to point it out, but sometimes, when I’m covering a story, it feels like I need to stress that point much harder than expected.

I understand why the Central Belt bias exists and in some ways I also understand why it takes precedence in some specific issues. But I was also lucky in my first months in Scotland to have been in circumstances that made it almost impossible to assume people lived my experience in different parts of the country.

My very first introduction was as a postgraduate at the University of Edinburgh, where, to be completely honest, I was just around lots of other Americans. (Apart from my lecturers, most of whom were English.) So, if someone at the time had tried to stress that folks living in Inverness were doing things differently, I wouldn’t have needed convincing.

When I started working as a reporter, I again caught another break with another natural defence against the bias. At my first paper, it was a struggle to succinctly describe a patch covering everything north of an imaginary line from Aberdeen to Castlebay. Safe to say that, from my office in Inverness, it was clear that things were different than they were in Aberdeen, and again from Kirkwall, and again from Lerwick, and again from anywhere else in the patch.

It seemed obvious.

And yet, I regularly report on attempts to shoehorn education policies into........

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