It’s fair to say that 2023 started badly on the education front.

A teacher strike was ongoing, staff numbers had fallen, and both the government and SQA were forced to defend an appeals system that had generated massive disparities in success rates.

The feeling of aimlessness that had developed by the end of 2022 had very much continued into the new year and meaningful improvement felt like an increasingly remote possibility.

But then things picked up a little. Unions agreed to a new, multi-year pay offer which finally brought strike action to an end. What’s more, former teacher Jenny Gilruth was installed as education secretary in Humza Yousaf’s first cabinet.

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This was a bold move that seemed to signal a change in style, setting the new First Minister apart from his famously centralising and controlling predecessor.

Gilruth’s appointment was greeted with tentative but genuine enthusiasm, and you got the sense that teachers really were willing to get behind her if she gave them something to support. John Swinney had spent years failing as education secretary, and Shirley-Ann Somerville’s utter anonymity in the role was probably for the best - with a former teacher now in charge, it felt like there might just be the chance to build the sort of consensus and momentum needed for real, radical, long-term reform of Scottish education.

That all now feels like a very, very long time ago.

The Herald: James McEnaneyJames McEnaney (Image: Colin Mearns)

Further education lecturers rejected a poor pay offer in April and, a month later, the government broke a promise to provide colleges with additional funding. The school year came to an end with the government pulling all funding for teachers’ Masters level study and young teachers finding out there would be no jobs for them after the summer.

Next came exam results (pass rates down; attainment gap higher than pre-pandemic levels) and an overwhelming mandate for strike action amongst school support staff. Before the end of the year, the return of PISA results confirmed long-term downward trends in key areas of education.

But more than any individual story, the real issue was the nagging sense that any early energy and goodwill around Gilruth’s appointment had been squandered.

And why? Because the SNP is still caught in the considerable shadow cast by the former First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon.

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It is very obvious that all is not well in Scottish education, and anyone with the slightest grasp of reality can see that a number of very significant mistakes have been made since Nicola Sturgeon demanded we judge her on her record. But the SNP cannot or will not accept and acknowledge this simple statement of fact and, as a result, cannot move the conversation, or the country, forward.

There remains huge support for education reform in this country – but we have a government that seems to want to kick that conversation as far down the road as possible. Maybe in a couple of years it will become someone else’s problem?

So it feels like we’re back where we started. We have the same spinning of stats. The same sorts of people making the same sort of choices and being appointed to the same sorts of positions. A seriously fractured relationship between educators and the Scottish Government.

Above all, we have the same desperate need for major reform – and the niggling feeling that it’s not really any closer now than it was a year ago.