Tricky indeed, as you say - but no-one said it was easy! :-)

As a product of the 1944 Education Act (I took the old 11+ in 1955), I suppose I was subject to a reasonably stable educational system until I left school in 1962. Whether that system, with its tiered structure - public schools at one end and secondary modern schools at the other, with direct grant and other grammar schools in the middle - was fair and just is open to debate. But it was stable, if imperfect. Any changes to the system obviously affect those in the thick of it. Change has to happen and has to be implemented sensitively. What I think has happened in the last 20 years (20? 15?) or so is that there has been an ever-faster growing series of radical changes, some of which seem to be on a whim. The current SATS debate highlights one aspect of it - to test or not to test, for example. I think we have to ask ourselves what's been lost and gained in all this change. (And, by the way, how are we to take instances of schools having to raise money to buy essential textbooks and supplies - of schools with poor, decaying premises? In my locality, in the south-east of England? Supposedly the affluent fundament of the UK...)

I think I can see some correlation, for example, between media-driven spluttering ("GCSEs are easier to get", "AS and A Levels are all getting easier") and the emphasis put on testing, league tables, etc., by the governments of the day. Remember "Education, education, education"? What a useless and hollow mantra that now seems, with curriculum and other confusion in current education policies.