Two very different events looking at the education of Scotland's young people have taken place.

On the one hand, local government pulled together a seminar comprising about 100 of the most senior local government members and officers with the legal responsibility for education in Scotland. The seminar was supported by the universities and other relevant institutions. The Scottish Government declined to attend. On the other, the Government travelled to New York from where, we are told, a solution to Scotland's literacy and numeracy problems lies in practice from Brooklyn.

These two events indicate two very different attitudes to driving forward education standards in Scotland.

In one instance, all the professionals doing the job on a day to day basis together with their political leaders and supported by relevant academics met to discuss in forensic detail what is working well and not so well in our education system. They identified ingrained patterns of performance in our system, the underlying causes of poor outcomes where they occurred and they shared best practice about how poor outcomes for our young people might be tackled. The result was a clear, well evidenced understanding about what is great in the Scottish education system along with honesty about what's not so good.

There is a joint commitment to steadily improving outcomes where necessary, to shared support and learning and above all a recognition that whatever we do to improve the situation will only work if it's relevant and engaging to teachers in local schools and the individual children she or he is teaching. At the other extreme national political parties and the Government have accepted a trumped-up view of Scotland's education outcomes and standards only sustainable if you deliberately cherry pick small elements of our recent performance figures and then blow these out of proportion in arriving at any implications of the analysis. A sense of crisis iscreated which, it is suggested, only heroic intervention by Government usually with reference to exotic places such as Brooklyn or Ontario can ever resolve.

All our evidence shows that education inequalities and under-achievement are driven by a complex mix of economic circumstances, community, family and school that apply to individual children in quite different ways. They can only be countered by addressing the whole social context rather than attacking just one element of it. These circumstances will never be overcome by a grand central gesture but rather by the painstaking, sophisticated professional long term work between individual classroom teachers and the children in their classes. Of course they need supportive partnerships. They need appropriate data, information and analysis at local level that is understandable and useful to them in the classroom and they need the resources to do their job. Above all, however, teachers need a stable platform upon which to base continuous improvement. The illegitimate creation of crises, the consistent contention that somebody somewhere else always does things better and the feeling that any minute a new "whizzy big idea" is about to be imposed are unhelpful. Legitimate challenge by Government for greater and faster improvement if expressed properly is appropriate and welcome. That the Government should have boundless ambition and aspiration for all of Scotland's children is right and proper and it is equally valid for government to wish to oversee the design of an education system that produces the future citizens of the type it wants to create.

However, delivering on these challenges is a professional job best done locally by local government in local circumstances through a huge variety of well thought through local solutions. Teachers and the councils that employ and support them are doing that job in a dedicated determined but often undramatic way. They should be lauded and praised, supported and challenged and given time, stability to do their job.

Different perspectives from national and local government are expected and important but children deserve these to be reconciled in a positive partnership that produces better results and outcomes rather than a competition for publicity and power that ignores the needs of children and doesn't address the challenges we face. I am calling on the Government to make that partnership a reality.

Councillor David O'Neill is president of Cosla.