SCOTLAND’s Government education agency is facing questions after it emerged that not enough secondary schools had been inspected to make a judgement on improvements in the sector.

Official statistics from Education Scotland reveal that the most recent national sample size for secondaries was too small to make any meaningful comparison with the past.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said that closing the attainment gap – in which children from deprived backgrounds consistently get poorer grades – is her priority in Government.

She has announced a £100 million Attainment Fund in an attempt to raise standards and backed a new testing regime for all state schools.

However, the drive to push education up the political agenda could be hampered by the inspection system.

In 2012, Education Scotland – the public body tasked with improving schools as well as carrying our inspections – published “baseline” data for primaries, secondaries and pre-school establishments.

The data covered 2008-12 and schools in the sector were given marks such as "satisfactory", "good" and "very good".

Quality indicators include "improvements in performance", "learners' experiences" and "meeting learning needs".

For secondaries, only 64 per cent of schools were evaluated as good or better and 17 per cent were judged to be very good or above. So-called “positive criteria” were not met in 12 per cent of secondary schools.

The follow-up report, published in June 2014, showed the number of primaries receiving “satisfactory or better” marks compared to the previous baseline sample “remained unchanged”.

However, only 54 secondaries were inspected during the second round of analysis – a sample too small to produce a “statistically accurate” measure of performance. This meant that the secondary sector evaluations had to be included in the overall school measure, but not as a separate table.

In January, the Sunday Herald's sister paper The Herald reported how the number of overall school inspections had plummeted over the last decade.

In 2004-05, 491 inspections of primary and secondary schools were carried out, compared to 148 in 2015-16.

In the same period, secondary inspections fell from 53 to 23.

A sector source said Education Scotland had in recent years been providing schools and teachers with the tools to implement the new Curriculum for Excellence.

The insider added that the plan was now to shift the balance to a “stronger focus” on evaluations through an increase in inspections.

Some MSPs believe Education Scotland is not the correct body to assess schools and argue for the creation of an independent inspectorate.

Liz Smith, the Scottish Conservative spokeswoman for young people, said: "Inspections are vitally important because they provide parents with the necessary information to make informed decisions about where to send their children to school. It is therefore essential that there are regular, accurate measures across meaningful samples of schools.

"Everyone knows that many inspectors have found themselves seconded to do other work in schools during the development stage of Curriculum for Excellence and this has put unacceptable pressure on the inspection programme. This is not good enough and parents across Scotland deserve better."

Scottish Labour spokesperson for opportunity Iain Gray said: “The First Minister said that education would be the driving and defining priority of her Government, but a cursory glance at her record says otherwise. We won’t be able to close the gap between the richest and the rest in our classrooms if we are cutting the budgets for our schools, and the current set-up from the SNP suggests they won’t be able to identify the problems in our high schools through inspections.

An Education Scotland spokesperson said: “Education Scotland has planned its school inspection work with a view to providing data for the Scottish Government’s National Performance Framework indicator, which meets its statistical requirements.

"This has always been planned on the basis of a sample which combines primary and secondary schools together. Given the relatively small number of secondary schools in Scotland, it has never been anticipated that we would provide a sample to meet those statistical requirements for secondary schools alone.”