Last night we stumbled across an interesting little statistical wrinkle to our story from Wednesday about voters’ satisfaction with Scottish public services.

The middle set of figures there is especially revealing.

Because what those stats say in every case is that people who actually use services have a higher opinion of them them those who don’t, and whose impressions are therefore largely formed by what they read in Scotland’s stupendously negative media.

Almost everyone has some kind of contact with the health service and public transport on a fairly regular basis, so the gaps there are relatively small. But not everyone has children in education, so the striking 17-point gap in perception of the standard of schooling sticks out a mile.

Among voters who actually interact with the education system, a whopping 87% were satisfied with it – actually the highest figure in the entire survey. But among the general public who DON’T have any first-hand experience of them, schools were thought of much more poorly.

There are currently around 680,000 children in state schools in Scotland, from around 600,000 households with at least one child in them. (There are no figures we can find that are more specific in terms of the number of children per household.)

What we CAN say from the numbers in the table above is that most of Scotland’s 2.4m households – over 1.6 million – have no children in them (and some of those who do will have children either too young for school or who’ve already left).

So of Scotland’s population of around 4.3m adults, at least 2.4m (56%), and possibly as many as 3 million (70%) live in schoolchild-free homes.

(It seems fair to assume that most people living in households of more than three adults are either student flatmates or families living with elderly relatives, so the real figure is probably nearer the high end of the range.)

Those people with no direct current experience of schools, then, are dragging the ratings down a long way based purely on what they’ve seen and heard in the press.

(We have no way of knowing what the actual numbers are, but purely for illustration: IF the same number of people without any kids in school answered as the number of parents WITH kids in school, that would mean that the people who didn’t know what they were talking about had given education a satisfaction rating of just 53%, while the people actually using the system rated it 87%.)

That’s the sort of detail that you’ll almost never hear in media reports, which prefer to blare a simplistic headline figure and then invite politicians from all sides to spin it, rather than investigating it properly. But that doesn’t produce much in the way of useful information, just clicks and polarised comments.

It’s why we always advise readers to look carefully at any stat-based story, and work out what you’re NOT being told.