I AM about to become very unpopular, or even more so, some might say. Teachers across the county will soon be spitting their cornflakes into their beards and rubbing the leather patches on their jackets to the bone.

Although in truth, there is no need to barricade Chateau Wills because most teachers are, as usual, on one of their endless holidays.

Those that are not are probably on training days, or planning their next diatribe against league tables.

We are in the midst of exam results, and, for the 450th year in a row, we have had the best ever A-level results. Obviously, the figure 450 is not entirely accurate, but still, it’s close enough to get an A* at GCSE.

As the results reach ever higher standards, we hear the endless argument that exams are not getting any easier. It is perhaps indicative of the educational standards in this country that anyone actually believes this.

Anyone with any knowledge of statistics and standards will know this is complete and utter tosh. Teaching methods may have improved, but if exams are to have any worth, they must surely serve as a means of measuring and differentiating between standards of basic intelligence, knowledge and hard work.

The basic principles of evolution will tell us something must be wrong, as all pupils cannot simply be getting inherently more intelligent.

So why is the pass rate so much higher than it was 25 years ago?

At my school there was a chap who had a brain the size of Pluto.

At an age when most of us were wondering just how far you could stick a pencil in your ear (not that far, as my friend Benson found to his cost), he was arguing with teachers over the socio-economic background to the Franco-Prussian War.

This bloke was so intelligent he used to take great delight in embarrassing the teachers, and to prove it, he is now one of the major brains at Oxford University.

I am not sure what he does. I think he just sits there in the dark, radiating intelligence like a nuclear reactor emits radiation.

But the point is, back in the day, he only got four A grades at A-level – because that was all it was possible to get. Professor Stephen Hawking could not have got five, not even if he included made-up subjects, like general studies, or journalism.

If I sound bitter, it’s because I am. Not about the teachers, who in reality have a challenging job dealing with a minority of pupils who don’t need schools, but solitary confinement, because that is where they are heading anyway.

And not, for one instance, about the pupils. They can only pass the exams in front of them, and work very hard to do so. They deserve our congratulations.

No, I am bitter because I don’t want to live in a country where failure is not an option, where the results must improve every year or there’d be a national crisis.

I can’t abide the fact this is a country which gets the “best ever” exam results every year, but one in five of the 18-plus population is illiterate, according to the United Nations.

Where, despite our exam brilliance, in international studies of children’s science standards, the UK languishes behind Slovenia, Estonia and Liechtenstein.

Where in English, the proper use of spelling, language and punctuation is being lost to “text talk”. This means pupils who write “tanx”, rather than thanks, are not wrong, just “embracing a changing language”.

Balderdash. A recent comparison gave pupils a chemistry exam on the same topic at GCSE standard compared to O-level questions from the Seventies. Only 13 per cent of pupils passed the O-level question. Last year 50 per cent of pupils passed the GCSE at A* or A grade.

You don’t need to be Einstein to work out something does not add up. The teachers are not to blame, and, as mentioned earlier, the pupils certainly are not.

But the current system is letting down the whole country, and, for as long as we convince ourselves it is not, we are all failing.

As my old teacher Miss Wendy used to say, leading me over to Dunce’s Corner: “Never mind James, you should never be afraid of trying and failing.”