New Labour's obsession with mechanistic targets has reified this as the golden braid from which all true measures of excellence can dangle. The pupils enter the gates of their new secondary schools tagged with "measures of prior attainment", albeit based on spurious, contentious and unreliable data from their Key Stage 2 SATs. If you are not "in" education, or do not have a child currently within the quagmire of modern schools, you will already have been lost to the obfuscating terminology that embraces education with a life-stifling grip. It is a world in which Shakespeare is best studied by reading only the scenes that are to be examined and skipping the rest as irrelevant. It is a world in which spirituality is measured out in the number of assemblies or minutes spent in a PSE (personal and social education) programme and in which governments proudly announce campaigns to tell schools that "every child matters". It is too often a world presciently described by Dickens as one from which "springs...the mechanical art and mystery of educating the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections".

And the ultimate measure of the mechanical art is the arrival of the Ofsted inspectorate. I have to confess that my own school is not typical: it is one of a dwindling number of grammar schools. It must, by most measures, be rated among the top state schools in the country, even though we frequently admit pupils not from the top two per cent of ability but from the top 25 per cent.

We have nothing to fear from the inspectors, especially as, because of our success, we were assigned a mere one-day quickie inspection. Nevertheless, all of the staff were geared up and ready for the day, genuinely anxious to display just how good the school is. The pupils too, even the most recalcitrant, were determined that ranks would be closed against any outsider daring to criticise their school.