As today’s big education story makes painfully clear, there is a major problem affecting young people in the parts of Scotland classed as ‘remote small towns’.

These are areas which are home to between 4000 and 10000 people, and are also more than half an hour’s drive away from larger towns and cities.

There aren’t all that many of them, and they’re all outside of the central belt - most are in Argyll and Bute, the Highlands and Aberdeenshire, with a few found towards the south of the country as well. Places like Shetland, Orkney and Na h-Eileanan Siar have quite a high percentage of their population living in remote small towns, but that is obviously because Lerwick, Kirkwall and Stornoway are the major population centres for larger islands.

We’ve mapped out all of the ‘remote small towns’ in Scotland, as you can see here:

But why do I, an education writer (albeit one who loves a good map) care about this? Well, it’s because the school pupils living in these areas appear to be disadvantaged pretty much across the board.

Literacy and numeracy levels at both primary and secondary are lower than all other areas, and young people from remote small towns tend to leave high school with fewer qualifications.

And now we know that those school leavers are not just less likely to go on to higher education than their peers – they’re less likely to do it than they have ever been. That, in an era when we’re constantly told about widening access and closing gaps, is simply extraordinary.

​Equally shocking, however, is the fact that nobody seems to know what the hell is going on.

That would, perhaps, be understandable if all these issues had only just been discovered by some ground-breaking research, but that is categorically not the case.

First of all, all the information on this problem comes from the Scottish Government’s own data. I would therefore like to assume that officials and statisticians were perfectly aware of all of this. You’d also like to believe that politicians have known about it as well, but that depends on them bothering to go beyond the absolute basics and actually engage with something complex, so I suppose we can’t be too sure.

But there’s still no excuse for ignorance, because all of this has been raised before.

We reported the issues around literacy and numeracy rates back in December, and even that wasn’t the first time this has come up – I was writing about this more than four years ago.

Back then, nobody fully understood what was happening, but Phil Prentice – who was head of an organisation called Scotland’s Towns Partnership – did offer some intriguing suggestions:

“Educational attainment issues in small rural towns is a very complex mix of issues which differ across geographies,” he said.

“Some areas that could be looked at include depopulation of indigenous populations, problems attracting and retaining teaching talent, mixed year groups in very small schools, digital connectivity, concentrated pockets of European Union migration where English is not the first language, and wider general deprivation and social work placing of high issue families.”

He added: “Understanding the causal factors in more depth would encourage more positive policy responses.”

That call for “more depth” to our understanding was echoed by political parties.

The Scottish Liberal Democrats said the data raised “important questions” about how pupils develop in different parts of the country, and that the government “should consider whether further research into this area would help to shine a light on why our remote rural and small town areas are still struggling.”

Scottish Labour said there were many factors at play in the attainment gap, and that if the Scottish Government was “serious about closing that gap it would be acknowledging that, researching it and addressing it.”

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The government response was a bit different. Their spokesperson gave me the usual stuff about how education was a “top priority”, said that young people had been seeing “incremental gains in attainment”, and argued that more pupils than ever were leaving school for positive destination. It added nothing of value to the story, but that was (and very much still is) completely normal when dealing with the Scottish Government.

But the spokesperson also talked about how the government’s data-collection methods help to “identify lower attainment in particular areas or groups of children such as those in small rural towns.” They also said that “the Scottish Government and Education Scotland work closely with local government to identify these issues and support improvements where needed.”

Yet here we are, years down the line, with a government that still cannot or will not answer questions about the disadvantages faced by young people from Scotland’s remote small towns.

Now, their spokesperson tells us that “widening access to higher education is a priority for the Scottish Government, including for those who live in rural areas” – even when the government’s own data shows that things are going backwards.

They say that the government is “considering possible measures to ensure those in rural communities have equal access to universities” – but offer absolutely no details about the “measures” that they are, apparently, “considering”.

For what it’s worth, it seems likely that a complicated combination of factors is at play here: a mixture of geographical isolation, persistent poverty, less expansive educational provision, the cost of living crisis and more.

The trouble is that we don’t know, and we don’t seem any closer to finding out, with the result being more young people whose opportunities are being limited not being their ability, but by their postcode.