My own experience as a parent adds ballast to the well-expressed fears of many independent education experts. Scottish state schooling has become allergic to excellence and instead obsessed with mediocrity and uniformity. The blame for what appears to be a rapid decline lies at the door of an exceptionally well-meaning aim to close the poverty-related attainment gap. Human nature has kicked in, and with no discernible evidence that those children in the poorest schools, with the poorest attainment, are improving, it is as inevitable as night following day that those with targets to meet will close the attainment gap from the other end of the spectrum. If you can’t lift up the bottom, squash down the top.

More important to focus on then is the movement seen in Scotland’s education policy. This week, Yousaf announced that Scotland would rejoin the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), the leading international comparators of how education systems are performing. These studies are the only way for countries to benchmark themselves against one another, to avoid the confirmation bias politicians often succumb to as they tell themselves they are doing a wonderful job.

Want to see more SNP fails? – Politics Matters