Visiting a primary school recently, I was told by staff how much things had changed in recent years for those pupils who are often described, euphemistically, as “challenging”.

These challenges presented themselves in different ways: it might be pupils who threw bricks through windows, who said they had no friends, whose fists flew at the slightest provocation, or who saw little point of school - just as their parents and grandparents had done when they were at the same school. Or, perhaps, all of the above.

Now, teachers at the school said, there is much greater awareness among staff of the impact of poverty or trauma on children, and of the need to build bridges with parents if a school truly wants pupils to flourish. The dynamic between staff and families has changed: pupils’ misbehaviour, for example, is now something to be understood, not just summarily punished; and parents are welcome into the school every day, not just a couple of times a year for perfunctory meetings with harassed teachers.

Staff told me how much calmer the school is now: there are fewer flashpoints, and there is greater camaraderie among pupils, and between staff and pupils. Children and their parents are happier - and so are teachers.

There had been no magic solution, but one teacher told me that, after 20 years in the profession, she had seen a dramatic change of approach in Scottish schools, and it largely came down to this: staff know their pupils much better than they did back then.

We should not, of course, go all Pollyanna about this. Scotland’s schools and teachers do not have far to look for their problems, whether it’s budget cuts, workload or the capricious demands of a curriculum that promised liberation but still seems straitjacketed by high-stakes exams.

Yet the school mentioned above is far from unique, and my point is this: regardless of the successes out there, the overriding narrative around Scottish education tends to be one of almost unremitting failure. There are feverish tabloid pieces about violent pupils or “failing” schools (based on specious league tables). Minor grievances about a school are blown up into crises by gossip on WhatsApp or Facebook. There are political ding-dongs favouring hyperbolic predictions of doom over nuanced analysis.

Some of these perceived problems will be genuine, some genuine-ish and some blatantly false, but it all gets stirred into one big pot and served up to the public. Which ensures that, when I tell people outside of education circles what I do as a job, a common response is along the lines of: “Oh, things are really bad, aren’t they? And Scottish education used to be so good.”

All of this seems pretty out of touch, if you’ve sat in a school staffroom recently.

Yes, you’ll hear gallows humour about the demands of the job, and wisecracks about the bureaucratic nonsense teachers have to pick their way through. But you’ll also hear people who are fired up, who feel that schools are more in tune with their pupils than they have ever been, who see boundless progress in the 30 or so years since teachers finally stopped belting children into submission. They see breakthroughs with children who in the past would have drifted inexorably to crime or destitution. They see 11-year-olds bounding out of P7 and into S1, whereas their parents sloped off to secondary school hoping only to escape it at the earliest opportunity.

In some ways, schools are struggling. But they are also, day after day, scenes of remarkable success in the lives of thousands of children - and, these days, their focus extends well beyond pupils destined for university and professional careers.

We would do well to remember that in many, many ways schools in 2019 are better than they have ever been.

@Henry_Hepburn

This article originally appeared in the 13 September 2019 issue under the headline “The bond between teacher and pupil has never been so strong”