SCOTLAND’S children are a disgrace. (There you go, who says we dead tree media dinosaurs cannot do click-bait?) But seriously, many parents have been treated recently to their children bringing home report cards from school. Early indications suggest that those sullen hordes who leave the house in the morning transform into sparky, polite, hard-working little angels once on school property.

One despairs. If our generation had been like that, Dennis the Menace, Oor Wullie, Minnie the Minx and other pint-sized outlaws would never have been born. So think on, you horribly conscientious lot.

If an end-of-term report card is good enough for youngsters it should be dandy for another group of new starts. We refer, of course, to Scotland’s 56 SNP MPs, who have been in recess since Tuesday and return to work next Monday. Have they been a pleasure to have as pupils, or is their behaviour worth monitoring?

Let us start with arithmetic, for “the 56” are now the “the 55” following the resignation of business spokeswoman Michelle Thomson from the party whip pending the outcome of an inquiry into property dealings. The MP for Edinburgh West denies any wrongdoing. It has all gone quiet on the inquiry front for now, but the heat that was turned on the party both at Holyrood and at Westminster was fairly fierce, and more of the same can be expected if the findings are negative. How did the party cope? Let us say a B-minus at best. Some commentators gleefully welcomed the party being tested as if it had been living in some fool’s paradise for its entire existence, but that is hardly the case. The SNP, like any party that was once outside looking in, has known a few bad winters. It has not been tested, though, the way Labour was in the late 1970s or early 80s. While the SNP has not yet gone soft from its years in government, the Thomson row shows it is far from as streetwise as it used to be, not as careful in looking for bumps in the road ahead.

Now let us turn to the impact made by the 55. This has been remarkable, judging by the reaction of one elderly lady living primarily in the London area who has a holiday home in Scotland. Mrs Elizabeth Windsor, the Queen to most folk, was having a chat with Simon Hughes while conferring a knighthood on the former Liberal Democrat MP. Discussing the changes he had seen in his 32-year parliamentary career, Mr Hughes said more women were being elected. “But also many more Scots,” the Queen is said to have replied. In fact, ma’am, the number of Scots MPs has stayed the same, 59, but the make-up is different. There are many more SNP MPs, but considerably fewer, one each, of the Tories, Labour and LibDems.

As to how the 55 have been comporting themselves, they are either a fearful disappointment or a resounding triumph, depending on which side one is on. For those expecting fireworks, there was some early excitement when a report in The Spectator magazine claimed the Scots were “running riot” at Westminster, imbibing lashings of strong drink on their big wages, and being cliquey. “Watching them sip champagne on the Commons terrace and hearing about their fine dining and luxurious flats, one cannot help but feel the SNP’s new intake are already becoming the very metropolitan elite they claim to despise,” gasped the author. That was back in September and nothing has been heard since. One fears Scotland’s MPs have been taking behaviour lessons from those annoyingly angelic weans. There was also the matter of “clapping” instead of braying “hear, hear” and for a while the ravens were considering leaving the Tower in outrage, but it all blew over and now the SNP MPs emit hot air in the same manner as every other MP. Overall report card rating? An A from many, a big red F from the Sunday papers.

Enough frippery, and on to the serious business. Like some frustrated devotee of The Fast Show, Angus Robertson, the party’s Westminster leader, has been desperately trying to get a new catchphrase to fly recently: to wit, that the SNP is “the effective opposition” at Westminster, despite the 231 Labour bods sitting across from the government benches. But what has this “effective opposition” of Mr Robertson’s achieved? To hear SNP MPs talk, it was their anti-austerity campaigning that changed the mind of one George Osborne over tax credit cuts. Yet for an embarrassingly long time the party at Holyrood – aka head office – did not seem to know what its own policy was on reversing the cuts, which by then had become Scottish Labour policy. First it said the Scotland Bill did not allow it to do so, then it said it did, but it needed to wait till the Autumn Spending Review at the end of this month before it could say precisely what it was going to do. This was headless chickens stuff, and one wonders how it went down among the SNP lads and lassies at Westminster, aka the branch office.

In reality, it was not the SNP that changed the Chancellor’s mind but the actions of Conservative rebels. If the Chancellor does relent on the cuts – we won’t know the shape of any deal till November 25 – then it is Tory MP Heidi Allen who might rightfully claim to be the heroine of the hour. It was her maiden speech that raised the red flag with the Tory whips and, last I checked, South Cambridgeshire is a long way from SNP territory. With a working majority of 17, the Conservatives are vulnerable to rebellions, but in this case it was their own side that made them nervous. The grade A here goes not to the SNP but to Tory rebels.

This week, the SNP at Westminster has claimed another victory, over Sunday opening hours in England. We have all been there. Work or holidays mean you are in London on a Sunday. You go out before noon hoping to buy a book or a pair of shoes, and the place is Ghostville. The Government wanted English local authorities to be able to change that, but the SNP, fearing it would lead to the loss of a Sunday premium for Scots workers, said it would vote against, and lo it came to pass that a vote was shelved. Now, while it is laudable that Scots shop workers should be protected, was it right that English MPs should have been denied a vote? Was this not Scotland throwing its weight around in a manner oft criticised and frequently exercised by England? Outcome: a B for effort, but a C for explaining themselves.

Looking ahead to the new term, there are interesting times to come for the 55. Here is the rub, though. Whatever happens down there, the real action takes place here next May. Will the 55 be content to slip into obscurity, or do they see themselves playing a noisy, central role in the Scottish Parliament elections? Probably wise to defer to the head teacher, Ms Sturgeon, on that one.