The great thing about pessimism is that if your expectations of the world are low enough it is impossible to be disappointed.

There has been a lot of fuss in the last few days over the fact that GCSE results have been slightly lower than they have been in previous years, bucking the trend of going up and up indefinitely they had been following for the last goodness knows how long. Granted, the current educational system is a bit rubbish (or completely CRAP), but surely I'm not the only one who sees these changes as a good thing?

It goes without saying that results cannot continue to just improve until everybody is getting A*s in everything, the whole point of grades is to distinguish between the best students. As a solution to this problem, I should like to propose a massive overhaul of the entire education system (up to the end of secondary school at any rate) which rationally makes far more sense than the current one. Bear with me, however mad some of these ideas may sound (nobody likes change) they are actually far more logical.

To start with, to eliminate the problem of people complaining about grades, I propose that the current grade system be scrapped entirely and that students instead be given their percentiles, thus better showing exactly how they compare with their peers which would make it easier for universities/workplaces to decide which students to take on. This also has the added advantage of ensuring that it is possible to compare students in a variety of ways - in individual subjects, overall (combining marks from everything), over many years if you add different year groups into your sample, et cetera.

The next major change I propose is banning P.E. (most kids hate standing around in muddy fields first thing in the morning and get very little out of it) and instead splitting "biology" into "physiology" and "botany" and making it compulsory for students to attend at least one before-school (more on that later) sports club of their choosing. This would do a better job of encouraging pupils to be active and combating obesity than the P.E. lessons given currently as the students would be given more choice to actually do sports they want to do.

On the "before-school" clubs I mentioned in the previous paragraph, this is because it is widely accepted that students (teenagers in particular) do not work best first thing in the morning. My proposed school-day would start at 11:30am or so and finish at 7:00pm, with before-school sports clubs starting at around 10:00am. I think that this would work better because the physical activity before learning would do a good job of waking the students up nicely without tiring them out too much (obviously lunch would be at around 1:00pm, an afternoon break at 4:00pm or so and then students would eat their evening meal at home after school).

My next overhaul would be the qualifications students take in the first place. Instead of the current GCSE/A-Level system, I propose making it compulsory at sixteen to take a core qualification (worth less than a GCSE) in every school subject (currently on my list are grammar, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, literature, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, physiology, botany, Latin, history, geography, religious studies, computer science, music, art and psychology but I may add to it) to show that the student has a good academic grounding. In addition to this, the student would have the option to take further qualifications (instead of the core qualification and worth more than a GCSE but less than an A-Level) in a few of the core subjects of their choice with some additional options (extra languages like French, Mandarin, Spanish, Japanese, German, Russian etc., more specific branches of the sciences etc.) that would not be included as core subjects.

At eighteen, having finished their core qualifications students would take more further qualifications, possibly taking an even further one (worth two A-Levels) in the subject they intended to continue at university.

As you may have gathered from the above list of proposed core subjects I think it would be a brilliant idea to place more of an emphasis on the classic liberal arts in order to promote rationality and good communication, which I have noticed is something the world seems to lack and that you can never have enough of. The trivium shall be taught during what are now "tutorials" which will become times to collect valuable life skills, which shall also include a thorough grounding in politics, business and managing money among other topics.

In addition to the before-school sports clubs, there shall be clubs offering the equivalent of food technology (which will be renamed "cookery" to avoid pretentiousness), textiles, extra programming languages and basically anything else students want to explore. In some cases (programming languages, etc.) a certificate worth a core qualification might be offered.

Logically, I think that my changes would make for a brilliant system. Of course, it would take a lot of getting used to, but to my mind staying in a crap system just because you're used to it never helped anybody. I now call on my two readers (or something like that) to get me into office in order that I might implement my changes and improve this country for the better. Or to just not tell me that I'm rubbish. That would work too.

Lowri