Despite being scarcely four pages long, there was something for everyone when the initial findings of the International Council of Education Advisers (ICEA) sidled into public view last week.

First, there was the furtive nature of its publication - without any government announcement - at a time when people in Scottish education are more likely to be broiling on a beach than poring over the minutiae of dry pedagogical ruminations.

This seemed naïve on the part of the government, shortly after 23 journalists signed an open letter criticising it for an obstructive approach to Freedom of Information requests.

There is a prevailing narrative of an overly controlling administration that cloaks its doings in secrecy. Regardless of how fair that perception is, to quietly publish the ICEA findings was only ever going to feed the view that the government had something to hide.

Which is curious, as some passages support its ventures into controversial educational terrain. Both Curriculum for Excellence and the National Improvement Framework - including, of course, that hottest of potatoes, the standardised national assessments that finally come into being this month - are found to “share a clear and positive narrative of a bold nature which, if applied consistently, will help raise attainment and close the poverty-related attainment gap”.

Similarly, the international advisers - including home-grown experts such as Graham Donaldson and international big-hitters including Finland’s Pasi Sahlberg - call on the government to establish “multiple career pathways”. This will be pounced upon by ministers who have been on the backfoot over the prospect of a “Scottish Teach First”, as well as a new University of Dundee postgraduate course that squeezes studies and probationary teaching into a single year.

However, there are plenty of sections of the ICEA report that the government might prefer to file away quietly. The effusive praise for the Scottish College for Educational Leadership would have been welcome a few months ago, but now seems a tad embarrassing given the intention, recently revealed in the government’s Education Governance Review, that SCEL will be subsumed into the less revered Education Scotland.

Meanwhile, the call for a “research-based approach to improving learning and development” - deemed crucial to improving literacy and numeracy - jars with concerns that education research is suffering from a lack of government support.

And critics of government reform will be similarly bolstered by the international advisers’ warning that Scotland should guard against “becoming too focused on changing the structure of the education system when, arguably, the more important aspects are the culture and capacity within the system”. This comes shortly after the governance review paved the way for devolving greater power to schools and creating “regional improvement collaboratives”, which critics see as ruses to bypass councils.

Perhaps most tellingly, the advisers fear that education policy is “moving away from the ‘whole child’ approach of CfE towards a more specific, measureable approach”. Maybe the biggest question for Scottish education in the years ahead is this: how much is rhetoric about “data-rich” systems and “empowerment” a euphemism for right-wing educational obsessions such as testing and direct control by national government?

In To a Louse, Robert Burns lauded the “gift” of being able to “see oursels as ithers see us”; this, he counselled, “wad frae mony a blunder free us”. The international advisers have used their vantage points from around the world to warn us of pitfalls that could lie ahead for Scottish education. But is the government really listening - or will it cherrypick findings to suit an intransigent reform agenda?

@Henry_Hepburn