The HDD on my MacBook Pro isn’t quite as big as I thought it was.

The spare space was filled up by a piddling 6,500 high resolution photographs.

When I picked the kids up from school this evening, I was in a pretty foul mood.

I had just had a long conversation with Darling Wifey during which "dawning realisation" happened: a job I volunteered for at work turns out to be one that will involve a couple of weeks of all-nighters. Not a fun thing to discover.

So the poor kids, who charged across the school grounds shrieking "Daddy!" when they saw me, were rewarded for their playfulness with a snarl and Radio 4 at full volume.

However, by the time I had listened to the news of Boredom Frown being stabbed in the back by yet more of his own Party Faithful, I was feeling a lot more cheerful. It also occurred to me that picking up the kids and singing Sponge Bob Square Pants in the car on the way home was one of the high points of my life - so I cheered up and started chatting nicely with them.

Darling Wifey phoned again, asking me to pop into the supermarket on the way home and, wracked with guilt for my Grumpy parenting, I told the kids I would buy them treats. Little Madam chose two books, Little Nutter found two train DVDs in a bargain bucket, and Tiny Flirt nearly wet himself with excitement when I said he could have a chart DVD. What followed was an almost embarrassing outpouring of daddy-adoration that lasted until the moment we walked in through the front door.

Since then, our home has been creepily silent. The kids just vanished and haven’t bothered us since.

Guilt is good.

Christine Gilbert, head of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), said teaching rated as “satisfactory” was not good enough (BBC report .)

Which means that “satisfactory” actually means “unsatisfactory.”

So glad she cleared that up for us.

**Edited to add**

This rendered me speechless for almost thirty seconds: you can now get a degree from Butlins. A two year foundation degree in being a prat in a red jacket at a holiday concentration camp.

I am slowly coming round to the conclusion that it is actually me who lives in cloud cuckoo land.

Much to the BBC’s amusement (and mine, too, I have to admit) it seems to be bothering the Ockers that Team GB is ahead of them on the Olympic Medals Table - as the Sydney Morning Herald reported this morning, “Poms are winning, call an inquiry. ”

I think that they need to learn from Our American Cousins.

Before today’s Gold Rush was quite over, this is how the BBC reported the Medals Table:

Le Figaro:

The Berliner Morgenpost:

However, the Washington Post has invented a new way of counting medals that doesn’t just put the USA on top - it puts Australia ahead of GB, too.

And finally, MSNBC:

They don’t need to actually lie about it - just find a way of telling the truth that suits your prejudices.

If you got your A’ Level results today, congratulations. (I hope that there is no need for commiserations.)

However, let’s try to avoid jumping onto one of the many bandwagons associated with the ever-rising pass rate of the old-fashioned ‘Gold Standard’ of British education.

First, let’s look at the difference between modern A’ Levels and the ones that far grumpier people than me took in the “good old days.’

In the “good old days,” A’ Levels were marked on a bell curve every year and within each board, so only the top 10% of people taking a paper would get the top grade regardless of how many questions everyone answered correctly . This meant that there was no way of knowing if Joe Bloggs, who took UCLES A’ Level English Literature and got an A, had done as well as Bert Philpott, who took JMB English Lit and got the same grade. In effect, they weren’t the same grade and there was no way of measuring them against each other. The exams weren’t even looking for the same skills.

Worse still, if Joe & Bert’s little sisters took the same exams a year later, their grades couldn’t even be compared within the same boards because, as any fule kno, the bell curve changes with every cohort.

So in the middle of the 1980s (and just in time for me to take A’ Levels) the Uniform Mark Scheme was introduced. This meant that the mark boundaries between exam grades became fixed.

Fixed? Well, according to the Curriculum, Evaluation and Management Centre at Durham University, not precisely fixed - because while a 50% mark in one of my A Level papers would have got me a grade C when I took my A’ Levels in 1987, in 2006 it would have got me an A.

But crucially, that doesn’t mean that it’s easier to get a grade A in the 21st Century - because a valid interpretation of the data we have seen so far could be that it is proportionally harder to get 50%.

So we are still left with the question, has so-called “grade inflation” actually happened?

Here’s a few factors to consider when making that judgement:

1. Modern A’ Levels require a consistently high level of effort throughout the two years of study, as students have to complete exams at the end of the first year, at Christmas and again the end of the second year, and coursework throughout both years. Compare this with my own course in which all I needed was to collect a full set of notes for all my subjects, memorise them in time for the exams, and then sit nine three-hour papers in five days. In effect, I attended lessons and completed homework (an estimated 24 hours per week ) for 20 months, revised like fury for 4 weeks, and collected my certificates. As a measure of employable skills, my A’ Levels are useless - whereas modern A’ Levels are much, much more relevant because they measure how students perform under steady pressure over two years, meeting continual deadlines.
2. The curriculum and syllabus for modern exams are far more specific than they were in the “good old days.” My favourite anecdote is to point out that in the 1980s, I explained how nuclear power stations work for a Physics exam. My answer explained how fissile material heated water, which turned a turbine, which was used to generate electricity. I even explained how Fleming’s right hand rule dictated the assembly of a generator. Meanwhile, a couple of years ago the same level physics exam asked students about the ethics of nuclear power. But this is a glib comparison: I had a choice of topics to answer, and a variety of ways to answer them, so I didn’t actually need to know anything about nuclear power stations - I could have concentrated on another topic and made the choice in the exam. Modern students do not have that choice. And anyway, just because the ethics of carbon capture versus nuclear waste isn’t as precise a Fleming’s right hand rule, it doesn’t follow that it is easier to learn, less relevant, or easier to answer questions about.
3. Teaching standards. Yes, I had to comment on them sooner or later. While it is absolutely true that there are no demonstrable or even implied links between the standards that the government demands that teachers meet and pupil performance in exams , there is no doubt that teaching standards have improved over the last two decades. However, Ofsted doesn’t deserve the credit for this. Neither does the ridiculous testing regime imposed by national & local government as well as individual schools (I once counted up the amount of time that a secondary school I taught in spent assessing 14-18-year-old children - it was 25% of their time in school.) The reason for the improvement in standards is the unintended consequence of all the scrutiny that teachers have been under: teachers are now teaching to the test.

It doesn’t matter how complex a problem appears to be, the correct answer is quite often the simplest.

For all the pressure on the education system, for all the debate about skills, standards and professionalism, the truth is that education in this country is delivered by about half a million teachers, all of whom have been told that their job security and their next pay rise depends upon how well their students perform in their next examinations.

Three months after we started, including visiting dealerships for every major car manufacturer in the area, after ordering and then cancelling a perfectly good Volvo estate, after test driving damn near everything available within budget, after agonising about choices from the unbelievably mumsy (another MPV) to the ridiculously impractical (a 2+2 convertible) Darling Wifey has finally chosen and ordered a car.

I approve of the car. It’s one of the better models (in my opinion) made by Audi.

But her reason for choosing this particular car?

It is available in a colour that matches her new Radley handbag.

This is a brilliant idea.

According to Professor Ken Smith at Bucks New University (where?) “teachers should simply accept as variant spellings those words our students most commonly misspell.”

So instead of there being a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way of spelling, there are only ‘variants.’ Or perhaps that should say, “they’re our only variants.” Except it shouldn’t because that second version has a significantly different meaning.

But let’s not allow a piffling little detail like that get in our way! Let’s do what the Government always does with these ideas and roll it out into other areas. We can have “Variant Economics” - there is no recession! Our economy is booming!

Variant education: SATS administration this year was unbelievably smooth, marking was accurate, grade inflation is a myth and our students are doing better than ever in spite of crap teaching, all because Government policy is so wonderful.

Variant data protection: HM Revenue & Customs are the best people to look after our personal financial data.

Variant politics: Boredom Frown is the best man for the job of leading our country through these difficult times.

Oh, hang on. New Labour PR does this already…

A local news broadcast announced that the President of Armenia had won 100,000 rubles in the national lottery, and cut to a reporter in the Presidential Palace.

“Mr President, congratulations on winning the lottery last Saturday. ”
“Thank you very much. I just need to make my self clear about a couple of details. It wasn’t Saturday, but Monday. And it wasn’t 100,000 rubles, but 100 rubles. And it wasn’t the lottery, but a game of backgammon. And I didn’t win - I lost.

But thank you, it feels good to be a winner. “

Shut both the Veluxes and both the windows of the attic bedroom for the whole day.

Sleep in that bedroom that night.

The first thing that all this made me think of was this . Obviously, NTNON would have had a field day… except that I reckon the main reason there is so little satire these days is the fact that public figures are now not only far more ridiculous than satirists can portray them, but they are also inured to the effects of satire.

But that is a digression. I was in the corner shop this morning and saw the tabloid headline, "The day freedom Got Spanked ," and all I could think of was, "Whose bloody freedom? "

Surely if freedom means anything, then it means that aged perverts can hire consenting adults for a spot of kinky rumpy-pumpy behind closed doors without a newspaper most famed for its topless teenage models getting all sanctimonious about it?

I have to say that however pervy Mosley’s activities were (and, yes, shameful, too. Just email me your favourite adjectives) if this High Court ruling does anything to reduce the amount of smut-grubbing in our tabloids, then it is A Good Thing.