Hmmmm... Whilst I'm broadly in agreement, Steve, I wouldn't be quite so quick to bang the "Tories have screwed up education" drum. When did Labour do it better? Labour had a decade or so in power. It didn't remove league tables. Now, unlike two or three of you, I am not an heddi prurfeshnul (sic). But league tables are, as far I'm concerned, the root of all (alright, most) modern heddicaishnul evil. And health service, and wherever else they're shoehorned in.

A league table rarely measures anything useful; it's just a bunch of artificial metrics that are a limited subset (but easily measured) of what organisation X does. And what they do do is soak up a deal of resource that could be better utilised doing what the organisation SHOULD be doing. Either the people who should be DOING are sidetracked into justifying their existence, or any extra layer of pointless bureaucracy becomes a non-productive drain on limited budgets.

As for the Good Old Days before all this nonsense...My education happened in the 70's & early 80's. In ILEA schools. When I was 18, I found out that there had been talk of getting me assessed, age 12, and sent to a special school. Not because I was thick, but because I was exceptionally bright. I was messing about with A-level nuclear physics & explaining it to the teachers, frex. Nothing happened, because Labour doesn't (or didn't) believe in spending extra resources on bright kids. You were expected to shift for yourself. Not a level playing field. The Labour ideology certainly was not to give every kid the opportunity to maximise their potential. It was to concentrate any spare resource on thick kids, educationally challenged kids, "special needs" kids, to try to get them to a level that, frankly, very few of them were capable of achieving. So it was wasted.

The end result was, in my case, a kid who was bored with school by the time the 4th year (senior) mock exams had passed. I was bored with having to wait for almost every other kid in my classes to catch up with things that were beautifully simple and / or blindingly obvious. I was bored with listening to the teacher explaining something for the third time that I'd understood halfway through the first explanation. Arrogant? Perhaps, but this is a (long ago!) 14-15 year old I'm talking about! ;-) I wanted out of school, to be earning money. My imagination died for want of fuel, if you like (yes, I love "Dead Poets"). Left wing educational policies failed me badly, and I can't see, from the outside, that they've improved. Education remains a political football, with the left as bad as the right.

I never learnt to *think* in school; I never learnt to *learn* in school. I learnt that afterwards by raiding the local library for the likes of Edward de Bono and, later, Tony Buzan. In my opinion, the primary two functions of education should be to teach young people how to learn (I believe some schools do include such things as mind mapping in their curricula these days), and to teach them how to think i.e. how to assess evidence, how to spot flaws, holes, how to be not so bloody certain that you're *right*! ;-) Facts come a distant third. It's that "teach a man to fish" thing. Again, I realise that the UK examination system has changed, that there is more emphasis on coursework, but still... Passing an exam only really proves you've been taught to pass an exam (which certainly was true in my day!). I may or may not have been "stuffed" with facts, but I'd be hard pushed to tell you one single thing that I remember learning in school...