THE stuttering onset of Spring and Summer will pass unnoticed by phalanxes of young students heading precipitately towards GCSE's, AS levels and A levels.

Lower down the greasy educational pole, 11-year-olds are sitting SATS. It is an historical connection to harvest time that has left us with a system that blights the most pleasant time of the year, by filling it with tests and examinations.

But I suppose to make the bleak short days of winter even more unappetising by adding the revision to oblivion to them, would be no more desirable. 21st century pupils take around a hundred exams and tests during their school years.

Ted Wragg, Professor of Education at Exeter University, calls the current exam burden "utter madness", citing the fact that "the number of papers has gone up something like ten times in the last dozen years. There used to be 2.4 million scripts a year," he says, "Now there are 24 million."

It's not just the secondary schools, he continues, "You now have OFSTED telling Primary Schools that they should be taking the optional Year 5 tests, in preparation for the Year 6 ones."

At one school, inspectors urged the head to introduce Mock Key Stage 3 tests to prepare them for the real thing. Very soon there wil be more time spent testing students than there will teaching them.

My memory of examinations at secondary school was of teaching that stopped in June just before the examinations started.

Study leave commenced at the onset of the first examination and teachers were able to structure and assist our revision up to that point. Now, each year of the sixth form courses have to be taught in what is essentially two terms each, resulting in almost two full terms less classroom teaching.

A league table testing culture has steadily replaced what was once a learning one. This has resulted, in some worse case scenarios, in students being denied the opportunity to be examined in courses that may interest them, on the sole basis that their projected results might damage a school's standing in the league tables and hence in the eyes of their local community.

At the same time, a school in Solihull has been dragged into the media spotlight because it has adopted the politically correct attitude to sports' days that has so damaged our ability to compete at the highest level internationally in competitive sports. The worthy desire to protect the underachieving junior athlete or sportsman from the stigma of failure means that the child with a talent for running or jumping may have to endure a feeling of inadequacy when his more academic peers are shining visibly in the classroom, without being allowed to demonstrate his prowess on the sports' field.

Some schools do manage to combine that difficult task of allowing the physically gifted their moment to shine, whilst giving the less athletic group activities and games that protect their feelings of self-worth.

I speak as one who was ritually humiliated by the diminutive priest who took sport at my school. Despite the weekly misery of being used as a demonstration of how not to do a forward roll or leap over a horse, I would hate the inadequacies of one teacher (and human being) to deprive the gifted of their opportunity to shine and be admired for it.

It is the word "failure" that needs to be removed from education.