OK, thanks for the explanantions, Yusuf.

If it turns out that this is indeed the case and that the decision to go private with the special needs child has more to do with keeping him from the depredations of East End oiks,then the hapless Kelly will have sewn the seeds of her own downfall, which given her record was always going to be her likely fate.

Still,watching the usual po-faced New Labour figures trotting out the same line of spin that says they are not at all embarrassed by the Kelly business will be amusing, and things will become hilarious if Ms Kelly has the temerity to give an interview in which she will likely come across as similarly inept and incoherent as the likes of Beckett and Prezza!

The comic spectacle of the bi-lateral consensus of our two main party leaders on the issue again makes for a story of immense tragi-comic dimensions.

If more people are passing GCSEs and A-levels those qualifications are being devalued, irrespective of whether the exams are objectively getting easier or whether students are genuinely getting better.

The value of any qualification is based on the ratio between the number of passes and the number of appropriate job vacancies.

O-levels were not abolished everywhere. :) I’m currently teaching classes in O-level Accounts and Economics (as well as some A-level Accounts classes). We don’t teach any GSCE classes at this school, but I have looked at one of the GCSE Econ textbooks and, yes, it’s complete rubbish. The lack of O-level Econ courses in the UK has made finding a decent textbook for me to use in my classes near impossible. So I’ve been “creating” one of my own on the fly, using a variety of sources. I do think my accounting students are getting a decent introductory education at the A-level (on a par with US college freshman-level accounting).

Grammar school: school which takes pupils at 11 who pass an entrance exam (in the past there was a standardised entrance exam known as the 11-plus, which is still the case in some areas; pupils who failed it, which was most, went to so-called Secondary Modern schools)

Comprehensive: a school which takes pupils from a particular “catchment area”, meaning the local area, and deals with differing abilities internally

O-levels: exam taken at 16, usually after two years’ study; abolished in mid-1980s

GCSE: ditto, introduced in mid-80s, amalgamation of O-level with the old CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education) but nowadays considered “dumbed down” compared with the old O-level.

I hear these terms all the time, but don’t know what they mean. (In the U.S., if we use those terms at all, they have different meanings. Grammar school is just a word for any elementary - or primary - school; at least that’s how I use it.)

So what’s a grammar school? And then what’s a comprehensive school?

I finally sort of have an idea what O levels and A levels and GCSEs are (and maybe I’m using outdated terms for them…), but could someone explain those, too?

Now, because comprehensives have lowered standards, A levels have been dumbed down so everyone passes and GSEs are virtually worthless.

Labour politicians, hypocrites to the core, know that comprehensives are crap so they send their kids to private school. Meanwhile, the Somali girl in the tower block, whose parents want her to marry a cousin at 16, has no escape route. Once, if she was bright, she could have got to grammar school, then university, when the word meant something, and told her primitive parents to get knotted.

Progress? Equality? Labour want to keep the working class in their place.