The first time I heard of a crammer school I assumed it was a 16th-century foundation by Thomas Cranmer, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, where boys walked about the cloisters in long cloaks with copies of the Book of Common Prayer stuffed under their arms.
I guess we didn’t take revision quite so seriously in my day. In fact I know we didn’t. Revision was something you did in the week before your exams, and if you had to do it in public you tended to hide your book of calculus inside a copy of Smash Hits.
It was brought home to me just how much things have changed since the 1980s when I started discussing Easter holiday plans with the family, and noticed my son was shaking his head. There was no way he was going on holiday at Easter.
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