Next Gen News

Every year, there are stories in the newspapers (coverage gets steadily bigger - there was hardly any in my day) that cheer readers up and offset the usual gloomy tales of too few places, or our old friend declining standards. It's not an issue this year, it seems.

Goodo. This year 's Eye-Catcher, the' Brian Cox effect ", is said to a cheering rise in math and science students to the TV science don 's appeal to cheese cake. Goodo again. Whether they apply their knowledge in future employment studies, we can inhabit 't enough people who understand science more and more demanding world while we - most of us - not knowing how it works.

In riot-torn 2011, it 's right to start with happy stories. So here goes:

Rhiannon Brooksbank Jones, 19, from Nottingham, has such a passion for Korean that they allow an operating tongue her, say L was the Korean way. She got the grades they get in Sheffield to do to Korean studies and business management. Eleanor Davidson, from Birmingham (I think she visited David Willetts 's old school), has eight A * A-levels - no, that' s not a misprint - reading and mathematics at Oxford.

Actually, I'm always afraid of a little teenager who cleverly so that they can achieve such results (took more mathematics and Eleanor, not ballet and cello), because brilliance can be a burden, are.

Another precocious youth, Wajih Ahmed, who is now 13, clocked up another A this year, adding to his stock of two AS. Said Mohammed Noor, a 19-year-old refugee from Iraq who couldn 't speak any English in 2007, rose by a government school in Cambridge to read medicine, so he disabled people like his brother can help.

How will the new funding system work in the long run - good or bad for our university and its young customers? It 's too early to tell, and that the fees are already deterring young people clever mix of modest means.

Universities Minister Willetts, a thoughtful and decent MP in my book, was not give up on radio and television on Thursday, encouraging would-be students when they don 't this month successfully' s results or the hustle, heart-breaking clearing process, in which students are an estimated 185 000 29 000 points chase.

But Willetts also offended some listeners - try Jenni Russell 's thoughtful article in the Guardian - with the suggestion that they could involve alternative options to a three-or four-year study, training or other training programs to study part-time should work, and try again . "But decent education are as heavy as a place at Balliol College, Oxford, to find" Russell complained.

I 'm sure it' s right. But I 'm not sure that the Blair and Brown governments (Willetts also by the sound of it) were correct, so much emphasis on academic success for road space, when many young people in all sorts of clever ways, are not suitable to be the option, and many academic life 's career is best learned on the job, not about learning from books.

Ising patron? Not at all. My wife left school at 15, acute dyslexia, as we now know (but not then), fought in the school and would still, she says, ticking being overwhelmed by the horrors of the three-hour paper with the Clock . But she is very intelligent, and I'm typing in the beautiful house that their wisdom, not mine, bought a long time ago.

A tribal feeling, perhaps, but understandable - right for some, horribly wrong for others. The Guardian's editorial notes that the Mossbourne Academy in riot-troubled Hackney (the old Hackney Downs comp and grammar school that produced the likes of Harold Pinter, then fell on hard times) got 80% of its students a C-grade or above, including 10 accepted by Cambridge.