As you may know, education in Scotland, which is not in its finest historical period, is going to be “reformed”. These will be big reforms, according to the Scottish Government, sweeping away Education Scotland and the Scottish Qualifications Authority, and once again making independent the Inspectorate of Schools presumably so that it can, in fact, inspect education in Scotland, independently.

Now, let me suggest something to you. Let us imagine the Scottish Government took it upon itself to reform the practice of dentistry – or the manufacture of cheese. For the former, one imagines the reform team would consist of some NHS managers, some academics, some patients and a shedload of dentists. For cheese, I would suggest retail professionals, health and safety officials, consumers, buses full of dairy farmers, and, for completion’s sake, a couple of cows. There’s the cheese committee in one room at Holyrood, and the dentists in another, consulting with their patients and some politicians about the best way forward for the national teeth. And then in the next room, there’s education where….

Where what, exactly?  In the very big room accommodating the Education Review Board and its three (rather optimistically titled) “delivery boards” there are 59 people. And only three of them are teachers. In fact, these three are all headteachers. So, the central board and its three committees do not, among them, have a single actual current classroom practitioner. But there are 22 civil servants, a host of trade union officials and, in the Qualification Body Delivery Board, six officials from the Scottish Qualifications Authority – already imaginatively renamed Qualifications Scotland – that is, six people from a body thought so poorly of that it’s deemed necessary to replace it. And all this despite the plea by Professor Mel Ainscow in the last report by the education committee of the Scottish Parliament that “teaching should be given back to teachers”

Want to see more SNP fails? – Health Matters

Sign up to receive our weekly newsletter and join the fightback against Scottish Nationalism.