You can hardly avoid noticing that the education sector generally and Government policy in particular has become fixated with Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths.

This is not a dig only at the Scottish Government and educational establishment, the whole of the UK is at it. Rishi Sunak thinks we should all be studying maths at school until we are 18 – an idea I regard as horrific.

You can see the thinking. We live in a highly technological age so being clever at techie stuff will be good for you and good for the country. So let’s forget all the arty nonsense and concentrate on the shiny scientific future.

There are however three rather serious flaws with this plan.

The first is that we are actually in the UK already quite good at the “techie stuff”. Oxford, Cambridge and St Andrews universities, to name only a few, are world leaders in research. Britain’s problem is translating that research excellence into economic activity which creates wealth and jobs as well as generates more taxes to fund public services. In part that is because academia and commerce are not as well connected here as they are in some other countries, in part it is a lack of availability of capital to back great ideas........

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