According to today’s Sunday Mail, “Almost a third of pupils are getting extra time in GCSE and A-level exams under rules to help the soaring numbers of children with special educational needs.”

No surprise there for me. The expansion of what everyone but the po-faced education bureaucrats who administer it calls “silly time”—extra exam time awarded for claimed learning difficulties—is both a symptom and a cause of collapse in British education. At my school, everyone knows the game: you pay £250 to a friendly private doctor who will furnish you with a diagnosis of ADHD, autism, dyslexia, or some other conveniently nebulous condition. What you’re really buying isn’t treatment but an extra 25 per cent of exam time. Most of these conditions are either fabricated outright or just the medicalisation of stupidity.

A System Built on Pretence

The justification for silly time is fairness, the claim that students with “learning difficulties” need extra time to demonstrate their abilities. But when nearly a quarter of pupils in some schools are granted this advantage, the claim stretches credulity. Does anyone seriously believe that one in four people my age suffers from a genuine, debilitating condition? Or is it more likely that the system is being gamed by those with the money and knowledge to exploit its weaknesses?

This culture of gaming the system doesn’t stop with silly time. Coursework—a substantial part of many grades—is often ghost-written by parents, tutors, or AI tools. I know someone in my class who handed in a piece of coursework without being able to pronounce or understand some of the words in it. He got a decent mark for that, no questions asked. The entire process is a farce, where marks are given for work that everyone knows was written by ChatGPT. It makes education less a ladder for the able than a prop for the mediocre.

Broken Exams and an Open Secret

Even without silly time, exams themselves are a joke. They don’t measure intelligence or creativity; they reward formulaic thinking and the ability to mimic expected answers. I know this from my own experience.

When preparing for my GCSEs last year, I didn’t study for months on end. Instead, I spent a fortnight in April downloading past papers and their mark schemes. I dissected the bland, repetitive questions and analysed the predictable, checkbox answers. The system was so shallow that success felt like cracking a code in a children’s puzzle book. What I found was equal parts enlightening and depressing: the key to top marks wasn’t intelligence or insight but a willingness to play along with a system designed to reward mediocrity. The questions were brain-dead; the answers prepackaged.

I walked away with top marks in everything, but the experience left me cold. Exams should test originality, critical thought, and the ability to argue under pressure. Instead, they reward conformity and punish students who let on too plainly they are thinking for themselves.

Silly time only deepens this absurdity. It grants some students an extended play session in an already trivial game, further bending an already broken system. Far from levelling the playing field, it entrenches inequality, rewarding those who can afford to buy an advantage while penalising those who rely on their own ability.

The Role of Classics in Restoring Standards

The solution is not to patch up the current system but to replace it entirely with something that values excellence and effort. One radical reform would be to require proficiency in Latin or Greek—or both—for entry to any taxpayer-funded university. I know this will sound at least eccentric, and perhaps I’ve been spending more time than is good for me with Dr Gabb as my tutor, but it’s based on a plain truth: mastering these languages demands intellectual rigour, and the ability to grapple with complexity. These are the qualities that education ought to encourage and reward.

Learning Latin or Greek isn’t just about translating ancient texts. It’s an exercise in critical thinking, It’s about precision, and engagement with ideas that have shaped our civilisation. Unlike today’s soft humanities—with their endless pandering to the lowest common denominator—the classics demand real intellectual effort. They are a filter, separating the capable from the incapable.

A Defence of the Classics

Proposals like Oxford University’s to drop the compulsory study of Homer and Vergil in their original languages illustrate the downsampling of education. The argument is that studying these poems in translation makes them more “accessible.” What it really does is render them meaningless. Stripped of their linguistic complexity, the classics become an excuse for ideological posturing. Without the trouble of studying Greek or Latin, it’s easy to churn out nonsense about “post-colonial narratives” in Vergil or “gender fluidity” in Aeschylus.

Requiring Latin and Greek for university entry would serve as a narrow filter. It would ensure that only those with the aptitude and discipline for serious study receive taxpayer support. It would turn education to a more sensible purpose: identifying and cultivating talent.

A Ruthless Return to Excellence

The aim of education should not be universal participation but the pursuit of excellence. Most students would be better served by vocational training or immediate entry into the workforce. Put bluntly, most of the boys in my class would better serve themselves and their country sent out to address the shortage of agricultural labour. Most of the girls would do better with rings on their fingers and babies at their breasts. The fiction that everyone can benefit from it has devalued education and left us with a glut of graduates unqualified for anything except bureaucratic make-work.

A better system would limit exams to the top 20 per cent of pupils at age 16, narrowing this further to ten per cent at age 18. University should be reserved for the top five per cent with public funding only for those who demonstrate exceptional ability. Everyone else should be expected to go out and find some job suited to his real abilities.

Exams themselves must be rethought. Humanities subjects should be assessed by three-hour, closed-book exams with unexpected essay questions that test originality and critical thinking. Most students, if allowed to waste the taxpayer’s money by sitting them, would fail—and that is as it should be. Education should not be about accommodating mediocrity but discarding it.

A System That Embraces Mediocrity

The broader problem goes beyond schools and universities. We’ve become so obsessed with inclusivity and fairness that we’ve forgotten the value of excellence. Education, once a tool for cultivating talent, has become a means of levelling outcomes. The result is a system that rewards mediocrity and punishes merit.

Conclusion: Education That Discards Mediocrity

Silly time is more than a farce; it one scandalous element of a system that rewards excuses over effort and privilege over talent. Ending it would be a small step toward restoring integrity. But true reform requires more.

We need an education system that ruthlessly discards incapacity and mediocrity, one that prizes effort, originality, and intellect. Requiring Latin or Greek for university entry would be a powerful symbol of this shift, a return to the values of discipline and rigour that once defined education.

Education should not level the playing field. It should reward those who play the hard game and win.