Leaders: GTCS learns a tough lesson in court - and the case is not over THE General Teaching Council of Scotland learned an unpleasant lesson yesterday: you tangle with a highly trained mathematical brain at your peril, regardless of her possible failings as a teacher. Representing herself before the Court of Session in Edinburgh, Janet Gardner cited 113 errors of law, by her count, made by the disciplinary sub-committee that removed her from the teaching register. Three appeal judges quashed the decision and threw the case back into the GTCS" lap. Ms Garner is an honours graduate in pure mathematics and statistics and worked in research analysis before joining the teaching profession. Last year, after the longest case of its kind, she became the fifth teacher in Scotland to be struck off for what was called serious professional incompetence. It followed her sacking by Clackmannanshire Council four years earlier. The GTCS suggested she was ineffective in both discipline and teaching, with a colourful list of complaints from pupils. But while the council cited "poor attainment in her classes," the judges concluded it failed to take substantial evidence into account, and its decision lacked the reasoning "essential to a fair and rational decision." It could be fruitless and divisive to hazard a guess as to how many teachers in Scotland are failing the grade when it comes to competence, but the chances are that there are more than seven - the number struck off by the end of 2011, five years after new legislation gave the GTCS powers to do so, with the goal of preventing teachers sacked for incompetence simply moving to another area to work. But the way in which Ms Garner's case appears to have run up a dead end street, whatever the final outcome, is deeply dismaying. The effort to weed out incompetent teachers has been badly tarnished. The case has only highlighted the difficulty of finding a general measure of teachers" performance. The council apparently failed to prove its case on pupils" exam results of students, one of the only statistical measures of effectiveness. The GTC was given its new powers to confront the issue of underperforming teachers; unions have argued for continuing professional development and retraining instead. Alternatives to just striking them off the professional register should now be considered. One suggestion is that Education Scotland's inspectors need to be more pro-active in school inspections, focussing on identifying individual departments or teachers who are failing, rather than problem schools. Where will the case go from here? Could anyone else now hire Ms Garner? What would be the reaction of any children placed in her classes? After this highly public case, could she even sue over damage to her professional reputation? When she was struck off, the GTCS came under fire for taking so long to take action against her. Now the question is just how much further it and Ms Garner are going to continue with this case. A criminal manipulation of figures? Late last year, the Scottish Criminal Justice Survey, interviewing people to ask how many had been victims of crime, concluded that Scotland's crime rate had dropped for the third year in a row. The proportion of people reporting crimes against them dropped significantly. But the survey also reported that 45 per cent of the 13,000 adults quizzed believed crime had worsened. How could we be so wrong? That survey seemed to mesh with the Scottish Government's vastly more ambitious claim that crime figures, as reported under the Scottish Crime Recording Standard, proved Scotland had the lowest crime rate in 32 years - an important plank of last year's election campaign. Senior police officers are to tell next week's Police Federation conference that those figures are being subtly manipulated. What's at work, they say, is not misreporting or recounting, but reclassification of crimes. Only a cynic would suggest police forces in Scotland could have their own motives - maintaining police ranks or resources - for saying the crime picture is not what it seems. There was one notable alarm bell last year - that the deaths of 97 victims of knife crime, one figure that seems hard to manipulate, had seen a sharp rise of 18 per cent on the previous year. The Scottish Government has already been accused of the politicisation of civil servants by pressuring them to come up with comforting statistics. At the worst, the police officers" concern echoes the kind of grade inflation that has taken place in schools - with results easy to improve if you reset the parameters. A rose by any other name... IT IS always good to be reminded to see ourselves as others see us. The Economist magazine's provocative front cover this week rewrites the map of Scotland to make its point on the price of Scottish independence, renaming the land from the "Shutland Islands" to "Dumfreeze." All right, some of it was funny - like twinning "Edinborrow" with Athens. And yes, the reaction of Alex Salmond underlines that the chief weakness of the most ardent nationalists is their lack of a sense of humour. But "Ben Novice"? Surely the plummy-voiced charmers on The Economist (apparently their accents fuel our "local resentment") can do better than that? Dare one suggest that attitudes of certain sectors of frightfully well-informed opinion residing in the London borough of Smug have possibly changed little since the 18th century, when Dr Johnson reminded Scots that the noblest road that confronted them was to England? We could reply in kind. Take that high road to Londondeal and we might find Stonybroke or Needs, the charming Cotswolds town of Chippy Nationalism, or Brighton and Hosepipeban on the south coast. But let's face it, many English place names are so wrapped up in their characters they defy parody. Ascot? Henley? Slough? Surbiton? You have our sympathies.