BRIAN Wilson has only himself to blame for the criticism which is being levelled at his Action Group on Standards over target setting in education. The publicity surrounding this issue has been detrimental to serious attempts to use target setting positively as part of a drive to improve attainment and achievement.

Most seriously, critics are confusing the process of target setting with the rights of parents to choose their child's school and the need for information about the school. Any return to the ''league tables'' approach of the previous government will be regrettable. Schools must take responsibility for setting their targets and for giving information to parents.

The only course of action for those serious about enhancing opportunities for all, is to do our utmost to ensure that all schools do the best they can by their pupils. Research into the importance of the early years in a child's education has encouraged a move to divert resources to pre-school and early primary. The purpose of this is not just to pick up problems such as learning difficulties at an early stage, but to work with parents whose own experience of school may have been negative.

Every child comes to school with different life experiences, different prior learning, different levels of parental support and different expectations. If a school is a collection of individuals, then the school's target should be a sum of individual targets.

While many individual pupils may naturally aspire to be astronauts, we all know that achieving any individual goal will be done by taking a series of small steps, such as learn to read, get Standard Grades, get into training etc.

Politicians, and those who manage schools, quite understandably, don't want to wait 20 years to see which school produces the most astronauts, before being in a position to see improvement in levels of attainment in all schools.

Teachers inevitably look at exam performance year on year, and compare their school with others. They must be encouraged to set themselves targets which are not only ambitious for themselves but most importantly, ambitious for their pupils. Targets are not an end in themselves but a means of identifying priorities for attention.

The real concern is that the types of targets that have been set in this case by the Government might encourage schools to concentrate efforts on the group of pupils who may just manage to achieve the grades in question. If this is done at the expense of providing support both to the high achievers who will make the grades easily, and to those who are not likely to achieve good grades, then this will be to everyone's discredit.

National target setting is crude, and schools should be encouraged to set their own targets and to look at what they need to do to achieve them.

Under the previous government, the national publication of raw statistics in the form of ''league tables'' of certain aspects of pupil performance in national examinations was criticised, rightly, for not taking into account the fact that all schools are different.

This is the problem which the new government expected its Task Group on Standards to address. The pressure was on this group to replace the old league tables with new ones which took into account more variables, forgetting that a school's variables are as numerous as its individual pupils. Unfortunately the Task Group on Standards continued with the previous government's approach to national comparisons.

The establishment of the task group was itself the result of a soundbite approach to policy making. At the time it was established, Prime Minister Tony Blair was claiming that he personally was going to say how long each pupil should spend on their homework.

It is difficult to imagine that any pupil would believe that Tony Blair would have any idea about how much homework any children, other than his own perhaps, should be doing.

But Brian Wilson was under pressure to ''take action to improve standards''. What could he do? He cannot manage every school, encourage every teacher, support every child. The government should now abandon its attempts to try to find more and more sophisticated ways of comparing schools.

It should stop claiming credit for work which will eventually have to be carried out in schools, and may therefore avoid the justifiable criticism which has been brought down on it by its over ambitious claims and over hyped approach to the serious matter of encouraging improved achievement and attainment in schools.

The acid test of the current methodology will be if the targets are accepted by schools. They need to be encouraged, just like the aspiring astronauts, to go for self-evaluation, self-improvement, a series of ''tiny, achievable, tickable, targets'' to create a climate of achievement.

Target setting, as any modern business will tell you, is most effective if those who have to achieve the targets take ownership, and are involved in the process. If schools put out statements to the national media about their targets, they risk real damage to morale if these are not achieved.

But the worst aspect of such publicity would be the pressure put on individual pupils. This is not to say that each individual pupil should not be supported, helped, and challenged where appropriate, to get the best possible grades. But the government's target setting exercise does not do that.

If any target setting process is to be at all useful it will have to start with schools themselves in a climate which does not seek to compare and to criticise, but looks to potential for improvement.

Schools have to be supported to gain confidence, and the national focus on the publication of raw statistics is unhelpful.

What is needed is a focus on the needs of the individual pupil as a priority.

Janet Law is SNP Convener of Education in Perth and Kinross