Will the last person wearing the dunce's hat please turn the lights off!

YOU know you're getting old when the teachers at your son's school don't look any older than the some of the kids themselves. I mean some of the teenagers were over six feet tall, pretty muscular and sporting a fair bit of facial hair - and those were the girls!!

Yesterday was GCSE results day for 650,000 schoolchildren in the UK and my 15-year-old son seemed totally unfazed by the whole midday ritual when he and his classmates collected the brown envelopes containing those precious pieces of exam board print-outs.

There were a few glum looks, but mostly smiles, squeals of excitement and high fives as the youngsters gathered outside the school hall brandishing those important slips of paper. 

"I got an A* in drama, whaddya you get?" said one excited girl. Her friend also got an A* in a subject I couldn't catch because her voice was raised about six octaves too high for any human voice to pick out the exact words as the brainy duo embarked on the 'excited jumping up and down hug dance'.

My son ambled over to where I was sitting after chatting to a few friends along the way with no discernible way of face reading success or failure. I'd already given him the "it doesn't matter what exam result you get, it's about the real person inside" speech when he handed me the print-out and said "I did okay".

He did more than okay, although you needed a GSCE to simply translate the results; three sheets of paper, some with continuous assessment grades, others with the actual exam grade and probably a cake recipe thrown in as well - it was a mess.

Nationally, when the kids did manage to translate their results, girls outperformed boys in the A* grade stakes, and 26.5% of girls got an A grade compared with 19.8% of boys. Maths was the only mainstream subject where boys performed better. Put another way, nearly one in four GCSE papers picked up either an A or an A* grade as the pass rate rose for the 23rd year in a row.

For my son, he is relieved the exams are over which he found so templated and restrictive. He was being taught simply to pass an exam, lessons were geared towards both the assessments and the exams. He yearns to get to grips with A levels. 

I remain constantly perplexed by how our children are being taught and the value of what they are being taught. The exams tell me nothing. Are our children any brighter than the previous generation? - no, they're probably of the same ability.

Because here's the point. What was wrong with the old tried and tested system of one-off exams? Of course there was the criticism that it simply encouraged learning by rote for that one day, and of course one bad day could ruin two years' work - but that is life. Life is about a series of tests when your abilities are put under the microscope. Why should it be any different?

I can't comment on the standard of the exams or the marking. It's a hornet's nest. But I do know this. I went to a an old style Grammar school where all the youngsters in my year had passed their 11-plus. 

They were bright kids, very bright kids, some of whom went on to Oxbridge, many to university and no-one took any more than 11 O levels. It was almost unheard of that classmates would walk away with a shed load of A grades for their O levels, and only the absolute brightest reeled off a list of top grades from their A levels. So why is it common practice now?

Times have changed, education has changed, but if results were to be taken at face value then for the past 23 years we have been producing a new breed of super pupils. 

Having sat through numerous job interviews with numerous so-called A grade young journalists applying for jobs, I don't think so.