AS elsewhere, East Lancashire is celebrating another year of record GCSE results -- the best, we are told, since the exam was introduced in 1989.

The best? Or the most?

Pardon me for plumping for the latter. For I do not see how can it be that this continual increase in GCSE passes -- to such an extent that more than a quarter of pupils at one East Lancashire high school this year gained A* to C grades in TEN subjects -- is a reflection of actual achievement if it is not accompanied by any truly-independent quality control.

I do not wish to denigrate the work that pupils and teachers have put into the exams, but mankind's intelligence simply does not increase yearly at the rate that these ever 'better' GCSE results suggest.

What they actually show is yet another instance of the performance inflation that has been encouraged in education by governments, revenue-collecting examination boards and teachers, all with a vested interest in ever-increasing 'success,' ever since the 'real' tests of the old GCE O-levels were ditched in favour of the prizes-for-all philosophy that is now wildly out of hand.

The upshot is that the GCSEs are worth less and less -- so that even the independent heads of Britain's major private schools now want them to disappear, particularly as they have also become increasingly meaningless as a 'leaving' qualification since almost every pupil now stays on to do the A-levels whose value is also being undermined by the 'all pass' syndrome.

Rather than being proud of their clever kids, parents and grandparents should be worried that they are being short-changed by the system.

After all, wasn't it the rare case that, in their day, if anyone sat 10 O-levels, let alone passed them, they were budding Einsteins?

What does it tells us when, in the span of just one generation, our schools are mucked up with them -- that there's an awful lot of clever kids out there or just that we are being kidded that there are?