As I draw towards the end of the Thought for the Day period of my life, it is perhaps appropriate that I'm still talking about education, education, education. It's just a shame that over those eleven years no one seemed to take on board the essential things needed to make it better.

It seems that Edinburgh University is to overhaul its admissions process in an attempt to admit more students from disadvantaged backgrounds. It’s to introduce a scoring system requiring only minimum exam grades but considering other factors such as motivation and resourcefulness, for as its principal Timothy O’Shea explains, exam results are not good indicators of university performance.

This new initiative is a profound change in educational thinking, for no matter that the exam systems on both sides of the border have proved highly unreliable in recent years, both pupils and schools have been judged by their results, a view of education that is intellectual and competitive, favouring those naturally gifted, especially when set in a class-advantaged environment, but condemning vast numbers to failure.

Yet despite the fact that a government commissioned study says repeated exam testing lowers pupils self-esteem, and provokes a downward spiral of lower motivation, less effort and even worse exam results, school pupils in the UK face more exams and tests than anywhere else in western Europe.

We clearly need to reconsider what we mean by education, its purpose and who it’s for, but confusion reigns as politicians and educationists struggle to reconcile disparate and sometimes opposing ideals.

On the one hand education is seen as a market, with parental choice and pupils evaluating teachers, yet attendance is enforced by law with the threat of imprisonment for parents and permanent exclusion for pupils if they think schooling is irrelevant to their needs.

And at the same time as politicians make the system more centralised and prescriptive, they deny responsibility for any lack of moral values or social concerns in those educated by the system they control.

The problem, of course, is that education for life and lifelong learning requires an understanding of the purpose of this life that we are supposedly educating for? The Prophet spoke of education not as a legal obligation but a religious duty. It must involve the spirit as much as the intellect, human relationships as much as examinations