At the beginning of this week, The Herald ran a story about Antonia Berry, who is the new rector at the High School of Glasgow.

It’s not the sort of thing that we tend to spend all that much time on. We don’t report on new headteachers in state schools, after all, so why do private ones matter?

And going beyond that, there’s a broader issue with the coverage that journalists decide to give to private schools. Yes, they’ve always got plenty of positive stories available to fill a space, but these are wealthy institutions which have specialist PR staff working on their behalf. They also pursue good news headlines for commercial reasons, because at the end of the day they are businesses with a product to sell.

That doesn’t mean we ignore private schools – we have, for example, looked in some detail at the impressive work being led by Dollar Academy to develop a new form of qualification – but the bar for grabbing our attention is certainly higher, and we think that’s fair enough.

So what made us run a story about a new headteacher at a fancy private school charging £22,083 per year (school uniform not included) for pupils in S3, S4 and S5?

The fact that she is the first woman to lead the........

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