In an age of cynicism the cynic is king and boy are we in an age of cynicism. This helps explain why few of us are prepared to cut our politicians any slack, let alone give them the benefit of the doubt.

So here’s a thing. Reading some recent comments by Angela Bradley, the leader of Scotland’s largest teaching union, has sparked a sudden wave of what it would be patronising to call sympathy for the Cabinet Secretary for Education, Màiri McAllan, and the problems she faces trying to reform school education. Let’s call it understanding instead.

What sparked this was remarks Ms Bradley, the General Secretary of the Educational Institute for Scotland (EIS), made recently about the only multi-national comparative study of student performance Scotland currently participates in, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

She argued these assessments, which have shown Scotland falling behind England and some other comparable nations, were not a measure of how well an education system was performing, severely criticising the body which produces them, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). She added: “And PISA, the OECD has done a very good job of making the world believe that that is a very good measure of how systems are performing. It is a really good marketing job that they have done on that.”

Ms Bradley then warned Scotland should not be “lured down a Govian dark alley where the educational experience shrinks so that learning in the areas that make us the creative beings that we are is rubbished and learning is restricted instead to areas where performance is considered to be easily measurable, all based on memorisation and rote learning”. The actual worth of that learning was “very, very limited”.........

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