The Blob was one of a glut of 1950s low-budget sci-fi flicks fuelled by paranoia that Soviet Communism was infiltrating the US. The titular threat was an amorphous, all-consuming mass of cosmic goo that oozed over the unsuspecting citizens of rural Pennsylvania.

In the era of McCarthyite witch hunts against supposed traitors in the country’s midst, it wasn’t exactly the subtlest of metaphors: The Blob was a reflection of hysterical fears about a statist regime that wanted to take over the world, suffocating the roots of the libertarian American Dream.

Fast-forward more than 50 years to 2013, and, bizarrely, Michael Gove - then Westminster education secretary - started harping on about “The Blob”. Despite the distracting thought that Gove was likening himself to chisel-jawed all-American hero Steve McQueen (star of The Blob), it was clear what he was getting at. In Gove’s view, a cabal of pen-pushers, secretive academics and intransigent teaching unions were getting in the way of his enlightened educational reforms.

Jump to 2017 and, in a recent interview with Tes Scotland, Bill Nicol, like Gove, vented his frustration about The Blob. Nicol is behind the Schools’ Educational Trust (SET), launched this month with a promise to bring budget private schools to Scotland, with fees of £52 a week - an easyJet approach to education, as it was dubbed at the launch event.

It is by cutting through The Blob, a term he applies to what he sees as the wasteful infrastructure of Scottish state education, that Nicol claims costs can be kept so low. And a “natural consequence” of his model, if successful, he told us, would eventually be an education system with no schools run by local authorities.

Reasonable arguments

There are plenty of reasonable arguments that can be made against Scottish education - that it is stiflingingly homogenous, run by Byzantine authorities and spews out endless reams of impenetrable edubabble. The system must improve, and whether specific proposals such as standardised national assessments or more headteacher autonomy offer a way forward is not the point here - for education as public service to thrive, it must pinpoint its failings and adapt.

There is a difference, however, between finding the flaws in the model and wishing it did not exist at all.

Education in Scotland is often described as a bubble, where people confirm each other’s prejudices. Ironically, as attendees at the SET launch event denigrated that bubble, it felt like many of them were in another bubble. Working teachers were conspicuous by their absence; Nicol had been keen for them to attend, but reckoned they stayed away for fear of getting in trouble with their local authority employers. The event was attended mostly by older, professional men - if you were casting a reboot of a classic sitcom, the demographic was more Yes Minister, verging on Last of the Summer Wine, than Friends.

Among them, there was a common view that state education indulged failure: one attendee thundered that state schools were populated by the “dross” of the teaching profession. The SET launch was a reminder of a stubborn seam of opinion that state education is run by faceless bureaucrats, its schools populated by indolent apparatchiks.

Such critics are not shy in venturing their opinion. In contrast, renowned education academic John Hattie told a conference in Edinburgh this month that teachers do not trumpet their success often enough (“Teachers’ expertise ‘is something to shout about’”, 17 November).

Now - as education finds itself increasingly politicised and under attack from reformers - would be a good time to pipe up.

@Henry_Hepburn