Sometimes I wonder if Nicola Sturgeon regrets suggesting that education would be her government’s number one, top, biggest, most important priority. It was a bold declaration from a politician more commonly thought to suffer from an excess of caution than its opposite. It was a brave one too in as much as education is a wholly devolved matter and so one wholly owned by the Scottish government. If things go wrong, there is no one else to blame.
Well, things have gone wrong but it turns out there is always someone else to blame. When Shirley-Anne Somerville, the no-profile education secretary, suggested that a 2026 target for eliminating the poverty-related attainment gap was a wholly useless arbitrary date of no great consequence or significance it was obvious even the Scottish government accepted failure was more likely than success.
