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Good morning. We are just two days away from the moment of truth for thousands of young people in England, Northern Ireland and Wales - the morning that their A level results come through. This year’s new and tougher exams coincide with a report that the chief inspector of schools intends to challenge teachers not to concentrate too much on exam results. Schools are getting it wrong if they are no more than exam factories. A rich education is more important than rising league tables. This intervention seems to me to be the latest move in a debate which has been going on as long as I can remember. What do we want from our schools: high grades or rounded personalities? Most of us want both, of course. I was fortunate to go to a school which valued a rich education. We had our own playing fields, a dedicated art building, there were choirs, orchestras, plays; as well as a rigorous academic programme. And though there were some multi-talented individuals who could rattle off ancient Greek and also captain the hockey team it was good to discover that most people were really bad at something. My weakest points were maths, art and gym. I had an understanding with a sympathetic gym teacher that I could spend classes looking for the gym shoes I had somehow managed to ‘lose’ behind a radiator. As for art the most anyone could say about my attempts to paint was that I liked colour. Yet though I was bad at it, a pottery club in a lunch break became the highlight of my week. I never managed to make a pot but I spent the time quite happily moulding bits of clay into shapes that pleased me. I realise now that I was doing something a bit like meditation, switching off the active brain and just being present in the moment. The composer Gustav Holst used to say that if a thing is worth doing it is worth doing badly. And being bad at pottery was a good balance to the pressure of exams and the nerves and dread that went with them. I am glad now that I found out at school what I was bad at as well as what I was good at. Testing is a part of life; we all need to strive against ourselves to discover who we are, and exams are like signposts on the way to a greater goal. We used to say a version of the Lord’s Prayer which instead of ‘Lead us not into temptation’ had ‘Do not put us to the test’. But the test that Jesus had in mind, was the apocalypse, the final showdown between good and evil. Whatever is revealed on Thursday, it is not the final judgment on our lives, only an indicator of where we are going. For those waiting anxiously for results it is important to realise that failure is not the end, and success is only the beginning.