Have you ever had to tell a child that the work they have done is too good?

Well, it happened to me tonight. I have a speech and drama pupil who is 13 going on 40 - a very serious, old-fashioned young man. For his current exam he has to speak on one of a selection of titles on literary/dramatic themes; his subject is a comparison of two story tellers, and he has chosen two of his own favourites Dickens and Tolkien. Today, after spending part of the last few lessons discussing what approach he should take, he did his talk for me for the first time.

As a piece of written work it was superb - any A level student would be proud to present something so cogently argued and stylishly written. Knowing Jack I have absolutely no doubt that it is his own unaided work, yet putting myself in the shoes of an examiner I know that I would be suspicious that it was the work of a parent or teacher rather than a 13 year old.

Fortunately it is not an essay which he has to read, but a talk which he has to deliver, so I could praise it to the skies as an essay, and still tell him truthfully that to turn it into a talk he has to make the language less formal and more conversational. Not that Jack's normal conversation is ever particularly informal: not merely have such expressions as 'yunno' and 'innit?' never passed his lips, but his normal mode of speech consists of sentences in which you can all but hear the capital letter and the full-stop, which have subjects, verbs and objects each limited by their adjectives and adverbs, and which often include several dependent clauses.

Even so, I am willing to bet that when he takes his exam he will be questioned very closely about the content and style of his talk and will only be in this conversation that the examiner will be convinced that the style of it is very much Jack's own.

I remember my mother talking about a similar problem with one of her pupils - a boy who, at the age of nine, had a great passion for the works of Jane Austen and who was kept in the exam room a full fifteen minutes beyond his time proving his genuine encyclopaedic knowledge of all six books to an examiner who proved to be a fellow Janeite.

On another subject also connected with education. On Wednesday I was chatting with Ann and Hilary after work, and Ann talked about the herb garden she had worked on at a school where she had taught and which had featured on a regional television news programme, and how it had all gone (as such projects do) since she had left. I expressed surprise since the headmaster had brought a group to do our 'Trug to Table' workshop at that time, and his enthusiasm had been such that I was really pleased that, when hearing that he wanted the workshop to have strong links with that herb garden rather than the more usual social history slant, I had gone that extra mile downloading a lot of information about medicinal herbs and their properties and getting one of the gardeners to give me my own instructional tour of the garden so that I would know the more obscure plants as well as those we always talk about.

Surely, I asked, a man so enthusiastic about the project would not have let the garden go to wrack and ruin? No, he wouldn't, but sadly he had died of cancer and his successor had not merely been uninterested in the garden, but had rubbished everything he had done, turning a happy school into a hotbed of discontent and academic failure - which is just one reason why Ann is now a museum education assistant, and no longer a teacher at that school.

It set me thinking about all the school choirs, chess clubs, drama groups, science clubs, sports teams etc. which depended on one enthusiatic teacher and, despite their popularity and success, found no one to take over their running when that teacher left. It is all such a waste. And don't get me started on school websites: I recently had a look the website of one primary school known to me and found that it hasn't been updated since Josh (taking his GCSEs this term) was in year 5 and Jess was still in the infants!