One of the less well-publicised factors of his case is that his victim was deliberately provoking him while a classmate filmed the incident on a camera phone.

He cracked, as any normal human being would under that kind of pressure, and unfortunately attacked the boy with a weight. Now he has lost his job, his pension and any hope of benefits. I feel deeply for the boy, who was immature, misguided and is now disabled. But that does not excuse the treatment Harvey has received.

In any other aspect of English law provocation is taken into account. For a teacher, however, even when that provocation has been endured for 25 hours per week for 20 years, no amount of provocation is accepted even in mitigation after a plea.

Want my advice? Don’t teach. Tell your friends and their relatives not to teach. If you’re already a teacher, get out of the job. Because whatever happens, you will be blamed – unless the results are good, in which case someone else will steal the credit.

Recently, under the new school inspection framework, schools that used to be judged as “good” have only rated a “satisfactory” rating.

This is not because their standards are declining. It is because, as Ofsted confess, they are “raising the bar” in order to “drive standards upwards.”

This is no different to attempting to improve the health of the general population by calling everyone “obese slobs” if they are more than 10lb overweight and can’t run a half marathon in less than two hours. It won’t work. All it does is alienate and upset people – confirming a few prejudices and reinforcing a few stereotypes along the way.

And worse of all is the Lib Dem spokesman David Law’s comment: “the bottom line is that half of schools inspected were not good enough.” The “half of schools” he is referring to are the 10% that failed their inspections and the 40% which gained “satisfactory” grades – which as we remember meant “good” just seven months ago and which Law himself was perfectly happy with at that time.

The bottom line is that if you believe the politically motivated spin on any government figures, you are exactly the sort of fool whose vote these morons want.

So I’ve already had a go at Lord Snooty for his “brazenly elitist” ambition for our education system, but I’ve come round to a slightly different way of thinking about this. Forget the teachers – let’s think about the children.

Let’s just imagine that my wildest dream comes true: the English education system actually does adopt a differentiated meritocratic approach to schools.

Kids who have that magical combination of ability and application will be placed in an environment that allows them to thrive – that challenges them with the highest level of intellectual stimulation, while reducing to an absolute minimum the external enforcement of standards, rules and expectations. These children will develop stronger “moral muscles,” have a self-motivated work ethic that they formed within themselves, rather than imposed on them from above by others.

Less able, but still hard working children can be spoon fed, just as they currently are in our over-regulated, micromanaged system. It serves them well, and can continue to do so.

And the disaffected ones, those who can’t see the point of learning about Medieval history, algebra, Shakespeare and Boyles’ Law? Any teacher with half a brain can design a practical, physical curriculum (hell, we’ve all suffered those DCSF Inset sessions on “Kinaesthetic Learning Styles” often enough) just as long as we are allowed to ditch the bullshit that the New Labour Thought Police think is so essential.

The real difference is that by separating these groups, teachers can concentrate on a single task rather than three at the same time. Only a half-wit would imagine that a teacher can meet the needs of all three groups at the same time just as well as they can meet the needs of one group at a time.

Is that so dangerous? Only if you really believe that all children are the same. Only if you believe that “equality” means that everyone should be treated the same regardless of whether it is appropriate.

Lord Snooty has waded in with his Bright Idea.

Apparently, setting the entrance requirement for a teacher training course to a 2:2 or better will raise standards in education.

Would that be a 2:2 from a Russell Group University, or a 2:2 from a Million+ University?

And yes, there is a difference. A hell of a big difference.

Anyway, that prompts me to suggest my own three simple steps to raising standards in education:

1. Sack every single consultant, adviser and other daydreamer who produces “initiatives;”
2. Abolish the ridiculous system of measuring schools by the number of students who get a grade C or better at GCSE – because this creates a system where the brighter students are not pushed, and only the tiny fraction students who are on the C/D borderline actually get the full attention of all their teachers.
3. Take a proper, serious approach to classroom discipline. Stop passing the buck and blaming weak teaching. We need an infrastructure of behaviour support that, first and foremost, protects the vast majority of students from the disruptions that wreck their education.

There is only one universal rule in education: one size does not fit all.

Today, a colleague and I found a box of ancient lesson plans – and we were delighted to pick over them. Oh, how standards have improved since Tony Bliar won an election by declaring his three top priorities to be, “Education, education, education,” and explained, “Our children will learn more and they will earn more.”

These plans were truly appalling. One page covered an entire day; no curriculum cross referencing; no three-level differentiation; no specified learning outcomes; no activity objectives; no starter or plenary; no key vocabulary; no facility for evaluating or recording how well the lesson went. Under current guidelines, Ofsted would have marked those lessons as “fails” before the lesson had started.

It’s amazing how far we have progressed from those Dark Ages of education to the new enlightened era of New Labour education policy. Thanks to their continued vigilance and the hard work of Ofsted, all lessons are now extensively documented to prove that teachers are doing everything in their power to deliver Tony Bliar’s 1997 election promise.

Meanwhile, according to 2007 figures published by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, primary school literacy has fallen under New Labour; numeracy has failed to improve despite massive investment and interference new initiatives by the Government; most damning of all, after more than a century of stable but steady growth in social mobility, the ability of children from lower-income families to achieve higher-income jobs is now in decline for the first time since the peak of the Industrial Revolution.

And people ask me why I pay school fees…

I always knew I wanted to be a consultant, but by the time I get my act together and fill in an application form, this loophole will have been plugged.

Having said that, I’ll bet my trousers that it won’t stop the current lot of consultants charging £500 a day to tell me how to do my job, in spite of the fact that they haven’t done themselves it for at least half a decade.

The Education and Skills Bill had its Third Reading last week – and a Lib Dem amendment was accepted by the Government: schools must, "seek and take account of pupils’ views on policies on the delivery of the curriculum, behaviour, the uniform, school food, health and safety, equalities and sustainability " according to Children’s Minister Baroness Morgan.

When 150,000 school children were asked by Ofsted last year how much they felt that their views were taken into account when decisions were made, 34% replied "not much" or "not at all." So, in response, legislation will be submitted for Royal Assent "within the current Parliamentary Session" to ensure that children are consulted.

Meanwhile, senior teaching staff and LEA officials have a perfect right to ride roughshod over the views of the rest of the education professionals in their schools – better still, they are provided with professional training in "overcoming resistance to change" and "managing dissent in the staffroom" as part of the NPQH.

It’s nice to know that the Government values the skills, abilities and opinions of junior teachers so highly.

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.

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.

First, enlightenment is defined thus:

“if you have ice-cream, I will give it to you; if you do not have ice-cream, I will take it away.”

Anyway, enough of the Zen crap. Ofsted announced today that “schools narrow the curriculum by “teaching to the test”.”

Well, no shit, Sherlock.

I don’t want to be smug and say I-told-you-so (well, I do, actually) but back in October 2004 I wrote this:

A little investigation of the history of education in England brings us to the 1862 Revised Code of Practice, which introduced these very same principles into British schools.

Matthew Arnold (poet and school inspector of the 1890s) said that the system of school inspection was, “a game of mechanical contrivance in which the teachers will and must more and more learn to beat us.” Wade Nelson (professor of educational leadership at Winona State University) said more recently that, “Identifying specific teaching processes as the causal component of student success by any credible measure is so difficult that it’s practically impossible.” Prof. Nelson has one advantage over the UK Government: he has bothered to read history, and discovered the lessons learned in this country by 1897 when the system was abolished (last time.)

It was in place for 35 years last time. For history to repeat itself, we should be heading back towards sanity by 2023. And I plan to retire in 2025.

Meanwhile, the BBC has reported that “Schools Secretary Ed Balls said teaching to the test was wrong.”

Is there room on the naughty step for all of England’s teachers? I mean, how naif can you get? It’s wrong to speed, but the last time I did 70mph on the motorway I was the slowest moving vehicle between Leeds and Perth.

It is a matter of common sense: politicians can talk about ideals and principles and professionalism until the cows come home – but salaries and school budgets depend upon exam results.

And it doesn’t matter how clever the politicians, inspectors and LEA officials think they are. They will always be one step behind the teachers.