By the Easter holiday, facing exams as soon as they returned for the Summer term, surely the course should have been fully taught and by that stage pupils be in revision and exam preparation mode only. This could all be done remotely, as revision for a committed student should require no or minimal supervision. This year's cohort should have suffered not one jot from a lack of school time, therefore. Now next year's cohort is a different matter, as they have lost a considerable period of education rather than revision time. No-one seems to be talking about how they are going to fare.

Personally, I think he should go. Not for the outcome, let's face it every year, we go through the same TV footage of hyped up people opening their results, followed by whiny people crying that they were not treated right because they can't go to their choice of university - even some who got excellent grades. No he should go for not being prepared for the outcome.

Any computer system should be specified by the end user, modeled, tested, tested and re-tested. All eventualities and ways to break the programme should be tested and the owner should be seeing regular evidence of the outcome of the testing, so he knows what is going to happen when the real work is put through it. Batch testing on real data should have revealed what the outcome was going to be well ahead of the day the news eventually came out and he should have been ready to trash the system, if the news was so politically unpalatable as it seems to have become, or stand behind it with months of evidence from testing to prove that over-grading had occurred and the reasons why some were going to be disappointed.

That said, maybe my D and two E's at A level (I did bugger all work so deserved the disappointment) and years of being involved as the customer of new computer systems, as opposed to writing the programmes, don't give me the experience to have an opinion

Really according to 2019 stats London is number 3 and Paris 9 about a quarter of the size of London - circa 9m v 2m

And by saying that you reinforced my argument. A faceless individual in the civil service can sabotage the process knowing that ministerial responsibility means that a member of the Government has to stand in front of the press to answer for it, further damaging the Government

I have never been one to believe in conspiracy theories, it usually takes more effort to cover up than the value of the conspiracy, but I am now seriously worried that we are in the middle of a coup to overthrow our elected Government. Whenever someone says that the Government have failed to speak to a supplier of PPE, such as the latest medical equipment supplier who is exporting to Europe equipment that we could use here, what they actually mean is a low-medium level civil servant has not returned a call or followed up an approach. Matt Hancock etc. do not field these calls or approaches, they delegate this to our woeful civil service.

This benefits the politically driven section of the civil service deeply opposed to the current Government and the uneducated who elected them because the press attack the cabinet for the failing rather than the civil servants, who get off scot free. Public opinion gradually turns against the Government, who cannot defend themselves because that would be seen as an attack on the 'hard working' public health workers in PHE and the NHS, further turning public opinion against the elected Government. The end game, obviously, that the Prime Minister and his team will have to resign and be replaced or, playing a longer game, public opinion is moved to the point of them not being electable next time - either way the civil service wins.

I think now is the time for law enforcement to have a look at the actions of some civil service departments to see if there has been deliberate failing in public office, which has potentially put frontline health workers at risk of their lives and made this pandemic worse.

Oh for heavens sake, the EU is nothing to do with peace! That was NATO and the threat of mutually assured destruction between NATO and the Warsaw pact. The EU's contribution to peace is dubious at best (overthrow of the democratically elected pro-Russian leader of the Ukraine for example, to expand their border ever east).

How true. I was an avid reader of the Mail online, but cannot now stomach the number of total lies that they are printing as click bait, so that they can increase their advertising revenue. Very few of their trashy stories hold water - the haulage one made me laugh most, as having experience of the industry, very few companies transport concert equipment and certainly not in temperature controlled/ambient trailers used for food, so the idea that food would run out due to pop concerts being cancelled was ridiculous. I am actually reading the Mirror now instead. I factor in the political leaning but get less lies, more rationally argued stories and lower blood pressure (a danger factor for poor outcome with Covid 19!)

In that statement, you sum up everything that I do not understand with the slavish obsession to test, test, test. Apparently, when we were testing and tracing, it was based on a 98% negative result, a massive waste of testing resource by anyone's standards. Now we have the understandable desire to test all NHS workers (1M +?), but that will only work if having tested negative, the worker is then isolated and not allowed back out into the world at large or even back to their families, because as you say, people you know have had to self isolate more than once, because of symptoms. If you are tested today, prove negative and then get onto a bus or train or go to a supermarket, you may catch the virus and be positive tomorrow. How many of our NHS staff would be prepared for that kind of lockdown?

This just feels to me like yet another global media attempt to make everyone scared out of their skins. Everything is always the worst ever in the history of the world with reporters across the globe going into meltdown. Let us hope that when this has blown over and proved to be another medical flash in the pan, awful for those seriously affected but by no means a civilisation ending event, the hysterics in academia and the media, forecasting 80 million deaths worldwide and 500,000 in the UK, get dragged to one side and have it pointed out that they are useless at their jobs and their services will no longer be needed. We have had these panics with AIDS, bird flu, swine flu, SARS, MERS, mad cow disease etc. etc. and yet we're all mostly still here.

While I am uncomfortable that SF is the representative of the IRA in politics and certainly wouldn't want them to be part of any Government, it amuses me to see members of FF and FG rejecting them on the basis of terrorist links when both parties sprung from such groups themselves and have violent conflict in their history. At least this side of the Irish Sea none of our political parties have roots in violent conflict