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Sometimes these distinctions are strictly political. It suits the Scottish Government, and supporters of the SNP, to believe that things are good and getting better, just as it suits opposition parties and their backers to tell you that the opposite is true. Education is inherently political, but the way in which education is treated within Scotland’s awful, insular, and claustrophobic political culture, with it all-too-often reduced to petty point-scoring by politicians, is a significant problem.

And with an election not too far away, it’ll only get worse.

But that’s easily solved, right? If we just stick to the facts then we’ll be able to figure exactly what’s going on, won’t we?

It’s not like there’s a shortage of available information: the ‘school education statistics’ of the Scottish Government’s website has more than twenty different datasets covering areas like school leaver destinations, literacy and numeracy levels, teacher numbers, pupil exclusions, the state of school buildings,........

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