ABSTRACT
League-tables week always produces a pleasing flurry of hysteria. We connoisseurs of educational brouhaha particularly enjoyed this year’s outbreak, heralded by the London Evening Standard headline: ‘Cookery exams outrank physics’. The story was even more luscious than it looked, since the paper – followed by a posse of others, yelping in pursuit of the fox of dumbing-down – revealed that while physics GCSE at A grade gets 52 points for your school, a distinction in cake-decorating gets 55.
