This article appears as part of the Lessons to Learn newsletter.

Although a lot of the headlines around education in Scotland concern national government, when you are an education journalist in this country you also spend a lot of your time dealing with the organisations that actually have legal responsibility for schooling: local authorities.

News reporting tends to be built around clear headlines and a core issue, but sometimes – maybe even most times – that means that some aspects of an investigation don’t make it into our articles, and some stories don’t get told as often as they should.

One such story, which comes up again and again, concerns the role of unelected council officials, and their impact on local authority decision-making.

Every so often, however, enough details drip through, and the picture that they paint is so stark that the story does make it – as my colleague Garrett Baylor-Stell’s reporting on the actions of Scottish Borders council has shown.

The authority has been slammed for its handling of a consultation on the future of five rural nurseries, with the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman finding that the council’s actions amounted to “maladministration”, and the chief executive issuing a formal apology.

But that apology has now also been challenged, because some of the parents involved believe that the council is downplaying an absolutely key finding by the SPSO: that officials’ formal report on the consultation, which was provided to councillors as part of the decision-making process, “does not reflect the evidence” that was actually provided to........

© Herald Scotland