An Education Secretary here in the UK once announced that he wanted every child in Britain to get “above average results.”

On a similar theme, I am employed by the Catholic Church in this country to foster, inform and nurture faith in Catholic school children. Education authorities have narrowed this down to: an ability to explain religious belief; an ability to identify how religious belief informs religious and moral behaviour; a knowledge of religious symbols; and an ability to talk about the differences between your own religious beliefs and other peoples’.

On this basis, St Francis of Assisi has achieved a mixed result, averaging out at Level 3, which is pretty good for my seven year old daughter but not so good for the Saint who founded a major religious order.

Abu Hamza, who this week was charged with inciting religious hatred and the Americans wish to extradite to face terrorism charges, does far better according to the official guidelines. He has achieved a Level 7, which is an “excellent” result for a 14 year old. This is because he is very good at using the four Attainment Strands to motivate his followers into religiously-inspired action, having specifically identified the different religious beliefs of his – erm – targets.

In order to have an average, we must have a set of data. In order to choose the topics on which to base the data, we need to know what targets we want to achieve. In order to choose the targets, we need to know what everyone is achieving now, and build upon them. For this, we need to know the average.

Finally, an anecdote from school:
one of the railway companies only achieved 75% of trains reaching destination on time. The following year, they improved – they achieved 100% punctuality. How did they do this? When a train was running late, it didn’t stop at stations on the way.