Big school showdown as class swot and animal lover stand up to Gripper

TOM GORDON THERE’S something about education that always brings out the inner bairn at big school. Sorry, at Holyrood. MSPs start fizzing like kids on an E-number diet when it comes up.

So it proved at FMQs, where a galaxy of stereotypes added to the sense of playground chaos. First the class swot (Davidson, R) and then the soppy animal lover (Dugdale, K) tried to stand up to the class bully by accusing her of kicking education reforms into the long grass.

The evidence for the charge was John Swinney postponing the bill on education reform.

There was also the small matter of 121 new consultations.

The Tory leader reckoned reform was “on the slow train”, while Labour’s said the delay symbolised a government that was “indecisive and distracted”.

Nicola “Gripper” Sturgeon wasn’t having any of it.

Issuing the equivalent of a double-handed Chinese burn, she sneered Ms Dugdale was little more than “a pound-shop Ruth Davidson”, as her entourage cackled behind her.

Ms Dugdale gulped a big, brave gulp. “That is beneath her,” she said. “It is what we expected of [bully emeritus] Alex Salmond.”

Gripper and her gang contemptuously flicked the ash from their roll-ups across the aisle.

Posh boy Alastair Burnett, whose register of interests reads like the back of the FT, asked a question about a nursery in his seat. “D’you own it?” heckled one of the SNP bad lads. It fell to geek Willie Rennie to finally get through using that bully Kryptonite, laughter.

Would the First Minister please stop national testing and school league tables, he asked.

“We do not publish league tables,” growled Gripper.

“I do not support national testing and we will not introduce it.”

But every council is publishing every result from every common test, he persisted.

“We have national school league tables. She promised that would never happen.”

Ms Sturgeon bridled, but carried on: “That is not national testing: it is standardised assessment to inform teacher judgment.”

She glared at those now laughing. But she already sounded like the class clown.