The Scottish school system was once the jewel in the British educational crown. With good standards and low levels of social inequality, it was seen as the part of the UK where working-class kids could get ahead as a result of a high-quality comprehensive education.

The English system was a basket case by comparison, characterised by huge variations in school quality, poor outcomes and the occasional wacky education theory. In 1997, four in 10 English pupils started secondary school without sufficient levels of literacy.

A quarter of a century later, and the situation has flipped. The latest comparative data on outcomes for 15-year-olds across OECD countries, published last week, shows a Scottish school system in steep decline, blighted by rising levels of social inequality. The drop in standards is the equivalent of today’s teenagers missing around 16 months of maths teaching compared with those in 2012, 18 months of science, and eight months of reading. Scottish educationalist Lindsay Paterson describes the situation as “catastrophic”.

England’s performance on the other hand, with some caveats, held up relatively well, even with the impact of the pandemic, and it has moved up the international tables. The overall picture on child wellbeing in England is far from rosy: there is evidence that the attainment gap started to widen again just before the pandemic; England is doing badly on measures of child life satisfaction compared with other OECD countries; and new Unicef data last week put England at the bottom of the league table for increases in child poverty.

But there is little doubt that, educationally, England is performing significantly better than........

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