This article appears as part of the Lessons to Learn newsletter.
Today is an important day for the education team at The Herald.
My colleague Garrett Stell and I, supported by Gregor Kyle and Deborah Anderson from the editorial team, and backed by editor Catherine Salmond, have been at this for about 18 months now, and I think in that time we’ve done a lot of good work.
I was pretty open when I started this job that the goal was to make things better. For years I had complained about the quantity and quality of coverage of Scottish education in the mainstream press, and now we were being given the chance to change the equation.
Sometimes, that has meant pursuing an education news story with the sort of tenacity you might more typically see for political scoops: the Glasgow teacher cuts is one example, while the (still going, and increasingly ridiculous) investigation into Higher History marking is the latest.
We’ve run specials on both the college and university sectors (in both cases we opened up new data to provide a fresh insight into the reality of funding levels), reported on from more of the country than was previously the........