Let's copy China. What a great idea!

Well, here we are, living in home ed la-la land, then I have to go and spoil it all, making reference to the outside world, the one that starts at the line where my front door protects us (even though the door handle always falls off); the door stands there still, door to my home, gate to my castle, place where Mr Gove and all the little Ofsted pixies will never tread, unless I am ambushing them with boiled oil and a dead goat, if they dare.

Anyhow, PISA.

What a ridiculous thing to do. Rank your country via tests for children, and then judge yourselves as failing this and failing that, we must make the children work harder. They are slackers, loafers, and they are causing our country TO FAIL.

Are you all turned mad?

Say, I have a great idea! Why don't we create an international ranking of creativity, then issue all four-year olds with an orange, command DRAW THAT, and rank England better or worse than China, based on the International Creative Orange Quotidian Indicator Assessment Framework Initiative. I could listen to John Humphrys shake his surly locks and sternly ask how could we English, nearly Jerusalem, be quite so bad at the ICOQIAFI. What has gone wrong, so very wrong?

Pay attention to PISA then, if you must, if you want to construct little Chinese-copy-scholars whose days start at 6am, and whose homework ends at 10pm, for this will save you the playgrounds maintenance.

Be aware, be very aware, playgrounds for children over the age of five are virtually non-existent in your PISA-loving world. You will find a youth training camp, sure, but the PLA do not approve of play with a y: all that free-ranging, free-thinking, free-shifting, imagination-mixing, possibility-enhancing, multi-perspective-making, childhood play.

But when you've had enough of being told Tinkertop, aged 6, is never going to be good at PISA - she's a failure at representing her country, she's not making the grade, she's not taking the weight of our national expectations, her performance is too poor, and all is lost, lost, lost, you damned parent, this is all the fault of your low ambitions - when all she wants to do is dig a frikkin' hole in the ground, then remember, home education is still, as yet, an option.