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Over the past ten years, when I’ve been speaking about the state of Scottish education, or analysing the latest data on attainment or teacher numbers or classroom behaviour, lots of people have asked me variations of a simple question: how did we get here?

Very often I have responded with the following explanation:

Basically, Nicola Sturgeon was under pressure on education, and she went on a wee field trip to England, where people told her about a thing called the London Challenge. She listened, didn’t understand, then came back up the road and decided we’d do the same things in Scotland.

This, I should stress, was an obviously oversimplified explanation that I used to get a laugh from whatever room it was in, followed by a more detailed critique of the policy development process and the political implications. It was meant to be a joke.

But it turns out that my depiction wasn’t the caricature I thought it was – it seems instead to have been an exercise in unexpected realism.

Keep up to date with our coverage on Nicola Sturgeon's memoir

On page 255 of her new book, the former First Minister briefly deigns to address education issues when she tells us about visiting London in February 2015. This short visit to a single school, she explains, was “instrumental” in the development of a policy........

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