Even as principal Mark Jackson and his teachers at Ascot Primary School are rightly criticised for lacking emotional intelligence, their crude, two-tiered ‘graduation’ ceremony, based on performance in the PEP exams, should prompt deeper reflection on an issue they clumsily attempted to address: that education outcomes do, or should, matter.

The controversy will hopefully lead to two outcomes.

First, an end to the practice of promoting children annually despite their lack of grasp, at the appropriate age and grade levels, of foundational subjects critical to deeper learning in the language of instruction. This amounts to placing children on a conveyor belt to failure.