Failure is not an option. Really - you can't fail.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) - they really do have a quango for everything -  recommended this year in a letter to the former Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, that the A* grade should only go to students who get 90 per cent. An A grade is awarded for 80 per cent.  This is off the back of pass rates rising every year for the past 23 years. Last year one teenager in ten achieved three A grades at A level, prompting universities to complain that they could not identify the best candidates, the Times reports.  How is this A* scheme a solution to the problem, however? 

How about testing students a bit more rather than making them all feel special by giving the less able ones A and the more able ones A*.  The fear of failure in schools drives this.  It manifests itself in two ways.  Firstly, in our nannying and grossly overly PC society, to brand a child a failure is not right.  No one is allowed to fail anymore (until they get out in to real world and end up struggling to get a job).  Secondly, the very nature of the schooling system means that no government would dare make exams harder.  Who, after all, wants to be education secretary or PM when the headlines hit that exam pass rates have dropped dramatically? Instead we will head in the same direction we have been going in for the last quarter of a century.  But what will the powers that be do when everyone starts getting A*?