The John Blunt column

AT LAST, someone has taken up my suggestion about stopping the rot in our education system at the hands of the increasingly-discredited GCSE and A-level examinations which ever-rising numbers of pupils pass each year.

For I see that the leading public school, Ampleforth College, has scrapped English Literature GCSE exams because they are too easy and has introduced its own, harder literature certificate instead.

This is an encouraging lead that other independent schools would do well to follow - right across the curriculum - to end the all-pass devaluation of vital school qualifications.

Only this week it was disclosed that schools have been issued with a guide that identifies the "easiest" examination boards setting the GCSE tests so that they might improve their pass rates and league table positions.

It is high time this watering down stopped so that pupils - and teachers - were made to do real work to pass real exams. Otherwise we will end up with a load of brilliantly-qualified mediocrities.

Would that the independent schools would go forward from Ampleforth's example and realise the market potential of introducing their own "real" high-value examinations that fully stretch pupils. For if they introduced an exams Premier League, its qualifications would be the ones that universities, employers, parents and pupils sought.

Then the schools currently trumpeting year-on-year "success" in the ever-easier GCSE and A-level tests would have to go back to the gold standard that applied before failure became a dirty word.

No excuses this time

QUITE rightly, education standards minister Stephen Byers has warned schools that poverty and social disadvantage in their intake area will be no excuse for their failure.

My own junior school was in an inner-urban area so poor that, on wet days, some kids didn't come because they had shoes full of holes.

And yet, annually, it boasted one of the best 11-plus pass rates in town. Proof again that real tests keep standards up - whatever the economic and social conditions.

Weak Will gets no help

WHETHER it shows they are yesterday's men or discerning sorts who write off William Hague as a trendy stand-in, the absence of several big names - Michael Heseltine, John Major and Ted Heath among them - from the young leader's seaside "bonding session" for Tory MPs this week says something. Personally, I would have thought that the two-day Eastbourne brain-storming event at which MPs will be urged to get "in touch with their feelings" owes more to the psychobabble jargon that anyone who has been to a company seminar will recognise than to a recovery plan.

However, if the Tory MPs do come out of it fired up and acting like an Opposition at last, it will be a worthwhile change.

For since May 1 and since Mr Hague took over, the Tories might as well have been in Eastbourne all the time talking to themselves for all the impact they have made.

And isn't a pity that their best bruiser, ex-Chancellor Kenneth Clarke, is reduced to back-bench obscurity - biding his time, of course - when Little Willie and his lightweights have yet to land a punch on Tony Blair?

Time politics took over the asylum

BUS loads of Slovak and Czech gipsies are arriving in Britain all of a sudden seeking political asylum.

But it's not so much democratic liberty they want. They already have that back home after Communism's collapse.

Rather these "refugees" want benefits - income support, free housing and all the rest.

And they will get it for up to two years as that's how long it can take the Home Office office to process their claims for asylum.

Yet what has sparked off this surge?

A Czech TV programme showing gipsies enjoying the giro lifestyle in Britain has, we are told, got them coming in hundreds, all armed with the magic phrase "political asylum" as the key to the benefits system. It was the same in Canada earlier this year when Czech TV showed gipsies enjoying the good life there.

But the Canadians promptly stemmed the flood by insisting that all Czechs and Slovaks wanting entry must have visas.

Instead of bunging these handout-seekers in rent-free bread and breakfasts and giving them a benefits book for two years until their bogus asylum claims are sorted, the Home Office should do as Canada has done forthwith - and book some commercials on Czech TV to tell those in the bus queue back there that Britain is not a soft touch.

Glenda's puffed-up ego

FORTY-a-day fag smoker Transport Minister Glenda Jackson has blocked a £4,000 plan to change the air-conditioning in her office so she could have a drag at her desk instead walking to a smoking room a few yards away.

She stopped the scheme, we are told, when she found out what the cost was. Or was it because the public was told what the cost was?

Either way, the fact that the expenditure of £4,000 of taxpayers' money was considered at all simply for a junior minister's convenience says something of the king-size view someone has of this particular one's importance, does it not?

The opinions expressed by John Blunt are not necessarily those of this newspaper.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.