However, as with the entire issue of closing the poverty-related attainment gap, of which care-experienced children are an important part, and on which, as I fear history will recall, the First Minister placed such importance personally, there are ways of going about this. And it does look now as if schools are going to be compelled to uphold one recommendation from The Promise Scotland, which is that care-experienced children should not be excluded.

What constitutes an ASN is a wide and varied field, including neurodivergent conditions, physical disabilities and problems with your learning environment or family circumstances. It would be indefensible to say that children across the broad ASN spectrum are not entirely deserving of everything that Scottish education can provide for them. Headteachers do not like excluding young people from their schools – indeed, of the 8,323 exclusions in 2020-21, only one was a permanent exclusion, ie, one case in which the local authority had to find a new school for the relevant child. All the others were temporary, in a measure of the humanity and kindness of our teaching profession.

The government’s ‘presumption of mainstreaming’ policy, again introduced with the best possible intentions in the interests of ‘inclusion’, often leaves Scottish teachers reeling with the range of needs their classes include. Some of these kids have issues with their mental health and well-being that can make them very badly behaved, violent and aggressive.

There is a silent crisis going on in Scotland, fuelled by well-meaning but badly thought-out policy-making, which is taking its toll on our teachers and our young people, and it’s happening in Scottish schools. Schools must continue to be able to exclude any young person.

Want to see more SNP fails? – Health Matters