On the 20th of May this year, less than a fortnight after the SNP had won yet another Holyrood election, Màiri McAllan became the Cabinet Secretary for Education, Culture, and Gaelic.

It was a bit of a surprise and also provoked questions about whether education is a major SNP priority any more: in the history of modern Scottish Parliament, only one other education secretary had additional responsibilities added to their brief, and that arrangement lasted just one year before being abandoned.

But then again, Ms McAllan is regarded as one of the most promising rising stars in her party, so the appointment of one of the SNP’s big hopes for the future to replace Jenny Gilruth – who had been moved to the Deputy First Minister and Finance brief – did make some sense.

As I wrote at the time, she has a long list of problems to tackle as part of her education brief.

One of these is the issue of cutting teachers’ class contact time. The SNP promised to do this over the course of the last parliament, then – as many of us expected – completely failed to do so.

As the 2026 election approached, the party faced the very real threat of nationwide teacher strikes in response to this broken promise, and in response put together a desperate, last-minute deal to avoid such a politically-disastrous outcome.

But as we have previously reported, that deal turned out to be more like an agreement to hopefully reach a future agreement, and left major aspects of the policy not just unresolved, but uncosted. Since then, a collapse in the numbers joining the teaching profession has made cutting contact time in secondaries an even more difficult prospect – one sector insider recently described the whole situation as an unexploded bomb that Jenny Gilruth had left in her desk, and argued that delivering the........

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