I was not alone in the cautious optimism with which I greeted the news that Jenny Gilruth had been appointed as Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills in Humza Yousaf’s new cabinet.
She is, by all accounts, one of the bright, rising stars in the SNP, a possible leadership candidate in the future (say, next year) and she has two enormous advantages – she has done a ‘Real Job’, and, glory be, that Real Job was as a teacher, to be precise a modern studies teacher, rising to be a head of department before, eh... ascending (?) further to being an MSP.
So she knows, from fairly recent experience what the day-to-day life of a classroom teacher in a secondary school in Scotland is like, and I’ve no doubt that this clever, engaging young woman was a successful professional teacher. Indeed, I imagine there are times – like say, the last few weeks – when she longs to be back in the classroom, any classroom. “Anywhere, but somewhere else” as the poet Robert Lowell put it.
So I have to say I was a wee bit disappointed by two of her early publications. One was an open letter to Scotland’s teachers, and the other was her contribution to Humza’s “New Leadership, a Fresh Start” document, a glossy magazine where the word “fresh” was being used rather loosely, as if of a can found at the back of a cupboard which has passed its sell-by date, but which might, hey, still be fresh.
