A doctor says it can be treated, and thousands of pupils with streaming eyes will still sneeze their way through, despite the nasal sprays, eyedrops, antihistamine pills and chewed beeswax. (Pupils entered = 0; passes = 0; average score = 0.00; league position = 1st equal, along with 23,999 other schools.)One delegate at a conference utters the words: “I am a teacher, not a social worker.” If this doesn’t happen, it will be the first time since the Pharaohs.May: As schools gear up for national tests, GCSE, A-levels and vocational exams, a journalist spots that public exams coincide with the hay- fever season. Gillian Shephard says this is regrettable and will make the league tables look funny. (Nowhere else does the phrase “generally satisfactory” occur with such irritating frequency.)Whole careers will be forged by people fluent in Ofskrit. Universities will offer joint honours courses in the School of Modern Foreign Languages for students wanting to study Ofskrit and “Bakerspeak”, the official language of the national curriculum (examples: “deliver the curriculum”, “fulfil attainment targets”, “flangify your flidgets”, etc).April: Teacher unions meet at the seaside and threaten to boycott national testing. It will become part of “drama”.Scrabble, in which we still excel, will flourish, though the comprehensives will get no credit for this.March: Research is published showing that most inspections by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), the privatised body that has virtually replaced Her Majesty’s Inspectorate, concentrate mainly on bureaucratic matters, rather than the quality of teaching and learning.The language of school inspections, “Ofskrit” will officially be recognised by the United Nations as a language separate from English.

We shall have lost the Ashes by then, so cricket will no longer be classified as a “competitive” sport. This used to be called “arson”, and you were locked away for it.)

Schools will ask whether there is any money to buy the necessary books and equipment for this latest version of the national curriculum. After all, the Government found cash for books for the General Certificate of Secondary Education in 1985-86 (GeneralElection in 1987), and for the first version of the national curriculum in 1990-91 (General Election in 1992), so it is worth a bid for 1995 (General Election in 1995-96?).
February: A bad-weather month, which will not affect school sports since many schools have sold their pitches to a supermarket chain, and inter-school Scrabble will be able to proceed uninterrupted by snow.The Prime Minister will remind schools that all pupils must play competitive team games. Jesus was called Emmanuel, God is with us, and God really does still come to those who will receive him. Well, here’s my bit of Christmas good news for you: `God has come among you’. All you have to do now is find the stable.”And I woke with a start “All you have to do now is find the stable.”. January: Schools are sent their glossy copy of the Dearing Report, the “slimmed-down” national curriculum produced by Sir Ron Dearing.

(The Government set fire to the curriculum, brought in the Fire Brigade when the flames were out of control, the n congratulated themselves on dialling 999. We’re all homesick for God, yet too confused to recognise it.”The message of this season is that God is coming after us. It comes at all those brave and hopeless moments whenwe recognise the frailty and transience of what we have built our life upon. God will not cease to seek an entrance to your life.”You, too, feel the absolute nostalgia for God that is part of the human condition. It comes in those stabs of longing evoked by the sound of a treble voice in a dark church on a wild Christmas night. I’m only here to ask for quiet, to hush you before the curtain is drawn back God is his own witness and from all eternity he seeks you. “I have failed, of course, to persuade you, but I never for a moment thought I might succeed That was never my task anyway.

You find it reflected in the New Testament letters, most of which were written long before the Gospels.”Only later did they try to beat back upstream to the details of his birth, but the faith of the Church in Jesus is not founded upon them, though they are consistent with it.”He sat back. God who had in past ages spoken through the prophets had in these last days spoken in his Son, and that Son, now risen, was a living, energising presence who could be known by those who would open their hearts to receive him.”That was the first message of the Church. You may not believe what they said, of course, but you must admit that, if they believed it, it would make everything else, including details of Jesus’s earthly life, seem insignificant.”The important and difficult thing to grasp is that the first Christians were not religious theorists who had dreamed up a new set of metaphysical ideas: they claimed only to be witnesses of the action of God The long ages of silence were over. “They are just not interested in past biographical details because they are too busy proclaiming a present experience. This Jesus who was crucified, died and was buried, was not held by death.

He rose again and lives still, so that men and women can know him now. The frustrating thing about the early Christians is that they were not interested in playing that game at all!”The old man smiled. How could they be? It is almost certain that the first generation of believers in Christ knew nothing at all about his birth. Paul, for instance, mentions the birth only once, and then with a complete absence of detail. There’s no evidence that it was part of the early preaching of the Church at all.”The trouble is that we have allowed the conventions of biography to influence our approach to these matters. We like things to start at the beginning and to come to an end.