This story, on the other hand, unlike the one linked to just below this, is deadly serious:

A teacher has been jailed for three months for tampering with test papers at two primary schools.

Alan Mercer, the former head teacher at South Borough Primary School in Maidstone, Kent, was sentenced at Maidstone Crown Court on Friday.

He pleaded guilty in January to 10 offences of forging Key Stage 2 assessments at South Borough in 2002.

The 46-year-old also admitted two charges of forging Key Stage 2 tests at Eythorne Elvington School in Dover and two charges of forging PESE Grammar School entrance exams at South Borough in 2002.

Mercer, of Prospect Row, Gillingham, Kent, had also asked for a further 140 offences of forging test papers to be taken into account.

Judge Keith Simpson said the case was "so serious" that an immediate custodial sentence was required.

He said: "If others were to act in this fashion the whole system would be immediately and utterly destroyed, and that cannot be allowed to happen.

This has got to be the most significant "sovietisation of education" story yet, or at any rate since I started this blog. This wretched man is like some Soviet factory manager who just went that bit too far in lying about his quota fulfilment.

For me, the key paragraph in the above report is the one about "if" others were to do the same. For of course they are pretty much bound to be others behaving similarly, only cleverly enough not to get caught. The right way to rig the system is by putting the effort into the priming of the kids, so to speak, just before the exam, surely.

There is an ever more inviting business opportunity here, in the form of a totally private enterprise, totally non-corruptible exam system, whose bosses are willing to be patient about building their reputation, and to subject any politician or teacher who tries to pressurise them to savage public denunciation (after maybe a couple of private warnings first).

The key to the success of the operation would be not to kiss the arses of the ed-pols and the ed-bureaucrats. For never forget that these people are now the biggest exam cheats, not the teachers, and not (as in the old days) the pupils. For it would not matter if the official pols and bureaucrats hated their entrails, following some row during which said pols and bureaucrats had received a public roasting from our heroes for having tried to get them to ease their standards a bit to make them look like less of a failure. Such rows would help, if handled right. The parents, the best schools, and the pupils themselves, would all, if the entrepreneurs in question were willing to be patient and to tough it out with their "official" competitor/enemies, eventually flock to such an alternative exam system. Why? Because it could become the one that schools, universities, and employers regarded as the best.

As the official, ever more politicised exam system degenerates into an ever more chaotic and uninformative mess, which makes comparisons between individual pupils, and between pupils from different years, ever more impossible and confusing, the opportunity for something unofficial gets ever more clear.

Meanwhile, I see that this wretched Head Teacher (and 3 months in jail is only the beginning of his miseries) is from Kent, like my friend the Assistant Head Teacher. So maybe I'll be able to pick up some further inside gossip about this case over the weekend.