WITH education the self-declared priority of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s administration, it is essential that every part of the sector’s structure works to optimum efficiency. But, as Liberal Democrat MSP Tavish Scott argues in our Agenda column today, that is not the case with Education Scotland.

The organisation has become bogged down in bureaucracy, creating an industry of guidance that has confused schools and even been in conflict with itself. It speaks volumes about the gravity of the situation that it took a political intervention from Education Secretary John Swinney to try and sort matters out in a supposedly arms-length organisation.

Mr Swinney’s desired bonfire of the guidance involves, ironically, an organisation that came into being during a bonfire of the quangos. Education Scotland was formed in 2011 from a merger of Teaching and Learning Scotland and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education.

The aim was to make savings and better deliver the Curriculum for Excellence. However, unease expressed at the time about the fit between these two organisations – one developing the curriculum and the other assessing its delivery – appears to have been borne out. Not so much because of a conflict of interest so much as a conflict of function.

Given its crucial and continuing role of rigorous assessment, Mr Swinney should now consider whether the inspectorate could once again become a separate body – something arguably even more desirable given the current push to devolve more power to schools. He would also need, in that eventuality, to examine the remaining part of Education Scotland. How, for example, did it allow such a mountain of guidance to build up and how might that be prevented in future?

The instinct to reduce quangos is an admirable one but, in the case of Education Scotland, even where it produces reports effectively critical of itself, the suspicion remains that the baby of inspection has been left floating in the bathwater of bureaucracy.