The Daily Telegraph has an  Any questions? feature on education, and today the answer came from John Clare (no, not the poet)

The question, whether genuinely from a reader or the excuse for Mr Clare to air his views, was:

Why all the fuss about one GCSE exam board (AQA) dropping Latin and Greek when another (OCR) will continue to offer both subjects? Isn't competition for custom between the boards at least partly responsible for driving down standards?

And the answer:

"It is - as the two boards' contrasting demands in GCSE Greek rather neatly illustrate. While OCR expects candidates to know 625 Greek words, AQA requires only 350. Similarly, OCR sets 360 lines of text, compared with AQA's 250. OCR also requires twice as much prose as AQA. Yet candidates of both boards take the same exam, and more than 80 per cent of AQA's entries are from state schools.

"Presenting these facts in a Commons debate, Michael Fallon, a former Tory education minister, who ought to know better, said if the two syllabuses were merged, "the OCR syllabus would have to be significantly weakened". Why? Wouldn't an alternative be to take the opportunity to restore standards? Or are pupils to be encouraged to learn Latin and Greek at any price?"

Now I admit that the difference in the size of prescription between the two boards has worried me, but before the great mergers that swept away the Oxford Board, the Cambridge Board, Southern Universities Joint Board, and so on, we had a great choice, and universities surely knew which the easier boards were. So to have two contrasting exams now is surely all right. And Mr Clare's last two sentences show his ignorance of the position in the maintained sector. Restore pre-national curriculum standards in the Classics? Yes but how? And 'to learn Latin and Greek at any price' is not the point. To learn the languages in the reduced time the government allows is the real problem.