It’s schools week in Scotland. This is the week of the year, more than any other, when we talk about schooling, because it is the week in which our children have received their exam results.

The focus is understandable and correct; these results will materially impact the lives and futures of most of these children and, for them and their parents, emotions will have ranged from nervousness, to worry, to exhilaration, to despair. I’ve felt a touch of it myself, this week, with family members awaiting that most important of text messages.

Nonetheless, exam results in and of themselves tell us very little about how our schools are actually performing. And indeed, that insight is not easy to find.

Scotland has a relatively new Cabinet Secretary for Education, Jenny Gilruth, and she may turn out to be the best thing that has happened to Scottish schooling for some time. On entering the job, she immediately signalled her intention to rejoin TIMSS (the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) and PIRLS (the Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study).

This is critical; Scotland does not exist in a vacuum and our children will need to compete in a global jobs and education marketplace. It is to Ms Gilruth’s great credit that she is prepared, keen even, to ask this question even though she may be apprehensive about the answer.

Indeed, she probably should be apprehensive. The only international comparison in which Scotland remains is the OECD’s PISA - the Programme for International Student Assessment - which records performance in reading, mathematics and science. The outcome is mixed. Scotland performs at almost precisely the OECD average in mathematics and science, and slightly above the average in reading.

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Depending on one’s level of ambition, this may be deemed adequate. It means there are 30 or so countries ahead of us, but another 50 or so behind us. Within our own ecosystem in the UK, we are well behind England (which, itself, does not make the top 10 internationally), but ahead of Wales on all measures and ahead of Northern Ireland on one of them.

If you are happy with bang average, then you should be happy with Scotland. But, I must say as a parent and a citizen, I am not.

There are a number of good arguments flying around the news this week on how we should take forward the future of examinations, and many of those are worthy. There is merit in de-risking the one-day, final examination, in favour of more continuous assessment, for instance. There is merit, also, in analysing whether the structure of that phase of secondary education is optimised.

However, the fundamental problem with the focus on exam results is that it can prove to be a distraction from the more significant problems which may exist. In other words, we do rather risk fiddling while Rome burns.

I say “may exist” very deliberately, because, like all parents and observers, we rely very heavily on personal experiences and anecdotal evidence from others, rather than data. My own anecdotal experience is of highly competent (in some cases outstanding) teachers frustrated by a centralised agenda leading to what, in effect, is institutionalised mediocrity.

With this new Government, and this enthusiastic Education Secretary, the timing seems right to engage in a much calmer yet much more fundamental data-driven review, and if they engaged in it honestly and vigorously then parents and teachers would go with them. This is not to examine a replacement for Education Scotland or the SQA, or the reformation of any existing bureaucracy - this is all irrelevant fluff in comparison to the core question of how we in Scotland do schooling.

In that respect, we have many fundamental questions to answer. First, is the policy of closing the attainment gap working, and should we even be trying to make it work? What is the virtue of closing attainment gaps when the economy and society requires highly variable levels of school attainment? Can the attainment gap be closed while retaining any sort of pursuit of excellence, or is the compulsion to suppress the highest achievers (which I know has been the lived experience of many) in lieu of raising those at the bottom simply too great?

The admission that the experiment with this overarching goal has failed would be deeply uncomfortable for the SNP, but if the evidence points in that direction then it is an admission which must be made.

And if the evidence points to a fundamental problem, then other fundamental solutions must be considered, one of which might be the hours our children spend in school. The timetable is hardly taxing, and the ancillary advantages to more time being spent in school should be considered.

In Edinburgh, for instance, we have had a Friday half-day since I was at school, but what advantages might be conferred if that Friday afternoon was spent in school on, for instance, physical education? As NESTA Scotland’s report revealed last week, an astonishing two-thirds of Scots are overweight, and childhood obesity is one of the gravest concerns of Scotland’s paediatric doctor community. The lack of physical activity in state schools may be playing a significant part in this.

Furthermore, perhaps the policy of state-funded school meals, far from being scaled back, should be extended. We may find, for instance, that bringing the start of the school day forward by half an hour and providing all children with breakfast would do more to raise the level of the poorest pupils than anything thus far tried.

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Relieving the time pressure on working parents, particularly in the late afternoons and on Fridays, could be a timely boost to Scotland’s mediocre productivity and confer the economic benefits which, let us not forget, pay for the "free" meals and the rest of the education system.

And, of course, a discussion on the role of central government and the role of school heads, and indeed on the role central government can play in producing better school leaders, should be back on the table.

In life, there is a fine line between criticism and encouragement, and nowhere is that truer than in our nation’s schooling. Great things happen in Scottish schools, every day. Great people are produced, and they go on to do great things.

But facts are facts, and if those facts point to us being average, then the only fundamental question we need to ask ourselves is whether average is good enough.