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Exam factories

Teaching staff
Some of my teaching chums were deemed “rebels” for years. When they tried to break out of the strait-jacket they went bonkers and were sometimes put back in one. Or sacked. Tragic stuff. We spent years ducking and weaving and ditching the wretched curricu

Well, perhaps no longer. This year the grades slightly fell. Why? Those “exam factories”. Says who? The CBI. Honest – and I thought they weren’t keen on us “loony lefties”. Whatever, Katja Hall, the CBI’s chief director of policy, says: “We don’t want exam robots. We want young people who are stretched, rounded and grounded.” 

It all sounds a bit painful. Are our students balloons? Plump dullards? Like my Dennis Plum? The morbidly dull Plum certainly became very “rounded”, what with the canteen’s policy of Snickers and Twizzlers and chips. But “stretched”? Dennis spent five years on the rack of the national curriculum and it didn’t take at all.

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