In 2004, Francis Gilbert wrote a book called ‘I’m a Teacher, Get me out of Here’ in which he wrote of the epidemic of cheating in schools, laying the blame firmly at the teachers’ doorstep. His assertion that ‘any experienced teacher knows that cheating at coursework is rife’ was duly supported by several examples from his own teaching experience of students being ‘helped’ by teachers, who were themselves under the cosh, usually driven by stressed heads of department hell-bent on improving their results.

Fourteen years on, few things have changed. Coursework is no longer at the centre of assessment, although extended essays and the like still offer opportunities for cheating. Using the internet to get an expert to write essays has been partially addressed by more sophisticated software employed by universities and schools and yet the problem has only got worse.

Rather than exclusively blaming teachers, (although the increase in teachers charged with malpractice was up 150 percent last year), the focus has turned more on the students themselves. Last year, the numbers caught cheating in GCSE and A-level exams in England was up by a quarter on the previous year, mainly through the use of ever more sophisticated technology, notably mobile phones. Schools and examination boards need to be more rigorous, but that alone won’t stop cheating, especially as technology evolves. To make any significant change requires some changes to both our moral code and the primacy of the exam as represented through league tables.