Anonymous Complaints
At times you'd think they were describing a war zone - not a place of education and learning.
My two two daughters were both at secondary school during that period - so I knew the lie of the land very well - and I would ask my teacher colleagues for more details, for example:
Which schools were involved?
How often did these situations flare up?
What were the circumstances and scale of the problem?
Why didn't the teachers and their trade unions highlight specific cases?
Why did they all seem to prefer making anonymous complaints - instead of standing up and being counted?
The answer I got is that individual teachers are never keen to be identified - nor do they want their own schools to be singled out - because that could give them a bad reputation.
Instead they liked to remain anonymous - while raising serious issues about education services in Scotland's schools.
Now that seemed like a cop-out answer to me ten years ago - and nothing has happened since to change my mind.
The other day the BBC ran a news story about teachers buying basic things from their own pay packets - to subsidise lessons in the classrooms - basic items like pens, rulers and writing paper.
Apparently 300 teachers responded (out of 15,000 or so) to a survey conducted by the BBC - via the largest teachers union in Scotland - the EIS.
Some of then claimed to be spending hundreds of pounds a year - but all of these claims were made anonymously.
Which is what I don't get - teachers are one of the most highly unionised groups of workers around - well organised politically too.
So how can anyone take this anonymous approach to public campaigning seriously?
As any good English teacher would tell you - that's like trying to have your cake and eat it at the same time.
Or as my old English teacher Mr Drake would have said - 'you can't have it both ways'.
