A little over a year ago, I went through to Edinburgh to interview the new(ish) education secretary, Jenny Gilruth. We talked about a number of different things, but there’s a phrase that she used that has always stuck in my mind: she referred to proposed education reforms as a “juggernaut coming down the track”.

I thought it was interesting at the time, as it suggested that she saw the demands for change – sparked by her government’s pandemic-era failures, but ultimately rooted in long-standing concerns and a lot of international evidence – not as an opportunity to be grasped, but rather as a threat to be countered.

Today, we found out how she plans to do that.

The big headline is that the government has rejected the recommendation to end exams for most S4 students. This had been proposed as part of the Hayward review into qualifications and assessment, and it was always going to present a huge challenge to the status quo. This, as I often remind people, is a pretty conservative and inward-looking country, much to its own detriment.

Aside from clinging to annual exams in S4, S5 and S6 (and wasting a huge amount of teaching time as a consequence) the government seems to be trying to just delay things as much as possible, so various aspects of what is now a thoroughly theoretical reform process will be dealt with later, or by other people.

The defence for all this can-kicking seems to be one of ‘pragmatism’, and indeed the official response to the Hayward report includes the following paragraph:

“Importantly, all of the actions set out in this response are achievable, whilst taking into account the capacity of the system, at a time when our schools are facing a range of complex challenges as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, such as issues around attendance and behaviour.”

Gilruth wants to position herself as the one asking sensible questions instead of just rushing in with changes, but in reality it looks more like she doesn’t believe that her government, or the people around her, are up to the scale of the task. That is a very, very big problem but, to be fair, it’s not immediately clear that she’s wrong.

Despite the education secretary’s debate club rhetoric, nobody expected reforms to exams to be implemented immediately – indeed, many expected this to be a process that would take up to a decade. But the thing is, you have to start somewhere.

Today, Jenny Gilruth could have accepted the recommendations of the Hayward review and started the process of building the capacity needed to implement them; instead she seems to have decided that it’s all just too difficult and kicked as much as she possibly could into the longest available grass. In doing so, she has admitted that her government can’t deliver the sort of changes that might really make a difference.

If one were being incredibly cynical, they might wonder if the current government is hoping that someone else will have to take this in on from 2026.

The SSTA and NASUWT trade unions have backed the decision to keep exams for most S4 pupils, and with them the endless, grinding cycle that creates so many problems and contributes to teachers’ unsustainable workloads, but this isn’t really a huge surprise.

Why? For the unions to back the removal of exams, and the shift to the system proposed by the Hayward review, they would need to have seen evidence that it would be handled properly. This government has never provided that, and its track record across education (as well as other areas, like ferry building) does not inspire confidence in its competence. Remember, this is the same party that used to promise to eliminate the attainment gap and then spent years making the lives of teachers more and more difficult as it desperately thrashed around looking for solutions.

In that context, the fact that the unions have backed the status quo is a major indictment of this government, whether they realise it or not.

And while we’re asking questions about competence, what are we to make of the fact that this government has spent a lot of time, and a not insignificant amount of money, commissioning reviews only to decide that key recommendations cannot be implemented?

What exactly was the point of all that work, and what would be the point in doing any more, if the government – as has clearly been shown – can’t manage the processes properly?

What does it say about the governing party that Jenny Gilruth doesn't seem to have any faith in the work of her predecessors?

And how, above all, are we supposed to have any faith in the promises now being made by the latest education secretary?

Pretty much ever since the utter debacle of the 2020 exams, when the Scottish Government and SQA applied, and attempted to defend, an exam algorithm that targeted the poorest pupils for grade reductions, we have been told that reform of Scottish education is both necessary (which is true) and on the horizon (which we can now all-but confirm was entirely false).

The SNP initiated reviews of the structures of education bodies, started a so-called National Discussion about education, and asked a respected academic to put together a reform group looking at major changes to the current exam system.

Throughout, we were told that genuine, fundamental, radical reforms really were on the table – that this was about properly transforming this aspect of Scottish education to make it fit for the 21st Century.

It was a nice idea while it lasted.