in this day and age she does stand out as a progressive leader.
That's courtesy of extremely expensive spin doctors. This has allowed her to look progressive, competent and effective without any evidence for that.
Before I alighted upon the politics of sex, gender and gender identity, I was much more interested in the state of school education in Scotland.
I used to dismiss criticism of the SNP's education policies as unionists griping against the independence party. Despite knowing from my children's schooling that there were indeed issues, serious issues, with the new curriculum, I put that down to teething problems. I explained away our falling results in international comparisons as transitional, hoping that once they ironed out the issues, it would be fine.
It wasn't. It won't be. Because as with other issues, the SNP leadership is not willing to listen. Our results in international education comparisons became so abysmal, the Scottish Government decided to withdraw from them. Yes, that's right - instead of addressing the issues, they were just going to pretend they don't exist.
Funding for schools comes from Local Authorities. They've had their funding cut in real terms for more than a decade. (That's not how they Scottish Government spins it, but that's the reality.) My council has been told to "find inefficiencies" to the tune of several million pounds. That pain has to be carried by all public services funded by the council. So my already underfunded kids' school was told to cut over 300 grand from their budget. The school week is now shorter, breaks are shorter, kids are no longer able to take 8 Nat5s (formerly Standard Grades, the Scottish equivalent to GCSEs), all to save money.
Enter the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Following sustained, evidence-based criticism of the "Curriculum for Excellence", the recent OECD review into secondary education in Scotland was widened to include all schools. The report was drafted by the end of 2020 and scheduled to be released in February. It is customary to release the draft, then governments respond and those responses are incorporated into a final report.
The Scottish Government held it back until after the election.
The report was damning. The conclusions are no surprise to those of us who were concerned when the new curriculum was first introduced because those same flaws I thought were teething problems were there by design.
In my view, no leader of government who seriously fucks up the school education of their nation's children can ever be thought of as progressive.