The news was deafening. My daughter’s state school was rightly proud of its exam results, but it struck me as quite well-balanced compared to the London hothouses attended by friends’ children. Schools like the bluestocking academy where two girls who had a nervous breakdown and anorexia respectively sat their GCSEs while they were sectioned in a psychiatric unit. (Now that’s what I call a sick note.) Then I thought of an acquaintance and her daughter I had bumped into in the street. As the woman babbled happily about how hard Jessica was working for her Oxford place, I tried not to gape at the girl herself. She looked like she had come out of Belsen; sunken eyes, a beard of white down on her bird face, a tiny coat three sizes too big for her. Jessica looked more likely to be heading for an early grave than Balliol. Was the mother out of her mind? What fever of vicarious ambition possessed her that exam results were more important than her child’s health?