The class of eight-year-olds at Low Port school in Linlithgow are engrossed in the shapes on their interactive computer screen. They are touching frames to colour different fractions. This is a maths lesson, but it could be a game. The children at Low Port start using Smart Boards in primary one and continue throughout their time at the school. “The
internet is your oyster, explains Liz Greig, a teacher in primary 4. “I can go on to Google and get a map, say, and display it for the class. When we are reading, they can all follow the text on the screen. It’s much easier to keep them focused.”

The school spent several hundred pounds on these popular maths games last year and the pupil council is pushing for more. Where does the money come from? “We approach the trust fund,” explains the principal teacher, Anne Cook.

A DVD costing tens of thousands of pounds produced to support Scotland’s new music syllabus has been criticised as “disappointing”, “crazy” and “a missed opportunity” by some of Scotland’s leading music educators. A new music syllabus is being introduced next year which is aimed at making Scotland’s music education more diverse and creative. However, a GBP65,000 supporting DVD released last month has been criticised as failing to meet these goals, and sticking too firmly to the western classical tradition.

In schoolyards across Scotland, a battle is raging. On one side are councillors who say that spending the education budget sensibly means underused primaries have to close. On the other are banner-waving families – dubbed Kimbies (Keep It In My Backyard) – who say their local schools form the heart of their communities.

For the thousand ormore nervous first years who recently moved into Legoland blocks on the treelined Heriot Watt University campus west of Edinburgh, it is a hopeful time. As with the half of all young Scots who now go on to higher education, they are setting out on what they expect will be the start of a bright future.

But a young man tending the bar at Geordie’s in the student union could tell a sorrier tale.

Oxford and Cambridge universities say they consider the Advanced Higher as a more testing qualification and will accept students with lower grades than in equivalent A-level subjects.

It is a further indication that the A-level, once regarded as Britain’s “gold standard” qualification, has been discredited.

A-level results released last week showed pass rates rising for the 23rd consecutive year to a new high of 96.2%. Almost 23% of candidates are now awarded an A grade. The Advanced Higher pass rate stands at 74.5%, an increase of just 1% since the exam’s introduction in 2000.

Heller was synonymous with Catch-22; the same might be said of Michael Cunningham and The Hours. After two well received but slow-selling novels, A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood, published in 1990 and 1995, The Hours transported Cunningham into an elite league where critical and commercial success go hand in hand. The subsequent film, starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman, with a hypnotic score by Philip Glass, served merely to confirm the arrival on the block of a new literary superstar. He won a Pulitzer and enough credit to pursue his own dream.

The result is Specimen Days, which borrows the title of Walt Whitman’s Civil War diaries.

The image of the biological clock calling time on a woman’s fertility has been used to stereotype the “Bridget Jones” generation of women who postpone settling down and having children . . . but now a world expert on male fertility claims it also ticks for men.

Later this month Malcolm and Pauline Dixon will find out if they have defeated the government and can start a family, writes Jackie Kemp.

All they wanted was an ordinary family life – the kind most people take for granted. Cautious, do-it-by-the-book Malcolm Dixon and Pauline, his wife, did not foresee that their lives would be transformed to the point where they would mount a legal challenge against a government minister.

The establishment want to say that everything in the educational garden is lovely and the failures are the fault of feral children and feckless parents. The politicians at the moment just seem to accept that. I don’t know why they are so lily-livered. After all, they wouldn’t be with any other industry.”

Chris Woodhead is in combative mood.

But as the mention of his name alone is enough to induce high blood pressure in many staffrooms, this is little surprise. He’s been railing against the status quo since he was chief inspector of English schools in the late 1990s.

Fourteen-year-old Scott has learning difficulties and suffers from a life-threatening condition. He needs an operation but is refusing to go ahead with it after a family member explained it in a scary way. In a letter detailing his fears he wrote: “Will it hurt when I wake up from my operation?”

Clinical director at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh Zoe Dunhill has written back: “Yes, but there will be a special doctor there who will treat the hurting when you wake up.”

“We try to explain things in a way that is appropriate to the child, ” Dunhill explains. Soon, she hopes, the approach will help her overcome Scott’s resistance to the treatment.

Dealing with children who refuse consent to treatment which doctors and parents deem necessary is an increasingly important part of children’s medicine in Scotland.

Every month at this, one of Scotland’s flagship children’s hospitals, several children refuse to undergo procedures.