SOMETIMES the clearest sign that an idea is a good one is the nature of the forces arrayed against it. In Scotland, any attempt to drive meaningful innovation in our schools has been seen off by the McBlob – the self-satisfied, deeply conservative, protectionist community that comprises the nation’s education establishment.

For decades, our schools system has slowly slunk down global rankings and generations of children – particularly those from deprived areas – have been denied the kind of transformational life opportunities that come from a good-quality education. Whether through cowardice or inattentiveness, the radical reforms introduced by ambitious and conscientious pioneers in other countries have been rejected or ignored here. The failure of the Scottish Parliament over nearly 20 years to invigorate this debate, to deploy its muscle and convening power on behalf of kids to whom it might have made all the difference, is a disfiguring scar on the face of Holyrood.

This isn’t a party political point – successive Labour/LibDem and SNP administrations have washed their hands in the blood. Both have seemed to spend more time telling us what they wouldn’t do and talking down the efforts of others than devising worthwhile alternatives. There’s a lingering suspicion that our tribunes have been unwilling to expend their political capital, to get into a barney with the truculent, unreconstructed teaching unions and colleges, to risk their ministerial careers – that they just couldn’t be fagged with the hassle. The SNP’s solution to those embarrassing international rankings was to take Scotland out of them. Problem solved, after a fashion.

There is nothing in our national life that makes me angrier – I humbly suggest there is nothing that should make you angrier – than this failure, this self-inflicted wound, this destructive negligence. You may be ideologically opposed to free schools and city academies, but ask yourself whether as a nation we can afford to indulge your principled purity. Ask the inner-city kids from London and elsewhere who now unexpectedly find themselves studying at the UK’s better universities and gazing upon a future of open doors what they make of your ideology.

A classic example of Scotland’s calcified debate is the approach to Teach First, a charity created in England in 2002 to persuade top graduates to go into teaching in disadvantaged areas rather than, say, the City or the law, and help close the attainment gap. Nicola Sturgeon has hummed and hawed over whether to open our system to the project, even though it has been quite successful and versions of it operate in around 40 countries. The most recent independent studies found that its teachers have had a measurably positive impact on pupils’ GCSE results. In London, where Teach First has placed 3,000 teachers since 2003, the state schools are now the best-performing of any region, having previously been the worst.

The charity’s Futures programme, which matches sixth formers with no family history of higher education with mentors who provide advice and practical opportunities, has seen 80 per cent of those who take part attend university, compared to 17 per cent of students from low-income backgrounds nationally. Futures pupils were 50 per cent more likely to get into a Russell Group institution compared to a benchmark group. Sixty per cent of those interviewed by Oxbridge received an offer, something managed by only 25 per cent of total applicants.

Teach First has renewed teaching’s reputation as an attractive profession for high academic achievers – it is now seen as the second most prestigious career choice for all new graduates and has become the single most popular profession for Oxbridge leavers. The charity also encourages diversity: its most recent cohort included one-quarter who had been eligible for free school meals and/or the Education Maintenance Allowance, 38 per cent were the first in their family to go to university, and 14 per cent were from black and minority ethnic groups, double the percentage of the current teaching workforce.

None of this is to argue it is a silver bullet. The programme has achieved better outcomes in London than elsewhere, and the turnover of its staff in deprived areas is no better than the average. But it surely suggests itself as part of a wider jigsaw of measures that would introduce dynamism, diversity and greater aspiration into the classroom – all things Scotland needs more of.

Laura McInerney was a working class state-school girl from the north of England who, after graduating from Oxford, joined KPMG. She found she wanted to do something more fulfilling, and so signed up with Teach First. “It has genuinely enhanced the prestige of the profession and provides a more diverse teaching pool – one side effect is that influential figures like politicians, business people and journalists see their own children becoming teachers, working with 30 kids in deprived areas day-in, day-out. They then become more likely to engage with the education debate in an informed way, particularly in relation to children from poorer communities.”

Ms McInerney, who now runs the education publication Schools Week, found that the personal experiences of Teach Firsters allowed them to demystify the process of getting into a top university for the children in her class, and to raise aspirations.

Teach First already appeals to Scottish university graduates – almost 400 have signed up to work in English schools since 2012. And given Scotland has around 700 full- and part-time posts unfilled across primary and secondary schools, there’s an urgent need for warm bodies. Our large cities and rural areas, where problems like crime and poverty are common, and low ambition is endemic, would seem a natural fit.

Recently, the Scottish Government announced it would tender for a Teach First-style scheme to fast-track graduates into teaching. This has been met with predictable fury from the usual suspects – Larry Flanagan, a former Trotskyist and Militant Labour councillor who runs the EIS, claimed it would be a “betrayal of the high professional standards we operate in Scotland”.

The McBlob has no monopoly on wisdom – the declining performance of our schools would suggest quite the opposite. It’s time for Ms Sturgeon to stand and fight. Even if the Flanagans of this world won’t thank her, generations of future children will have cause to.