Class leader: Sir Michael Wilshaw, Ofsted’s chief schools inspector 

The watchdog said outstanding schools could have their status reviewed if their teaching was not judged to be of the top level. It is understood around 1,000 schools would meet this criteria and could stand to lose their top grade rating.

In his first keynote speech this morning, Sir Michael said: “We need clear and demanding criteria for a school to be judged good or outstanding.

“A good school should have at least good teaching, and an outstanding school should have outstanding teaching.

“Good and outstanding leadership of teaching and learning drives improvement and knows that the culture of the school and the progress of pupils depend on it.”

Under new grading guidelines, the satisfactory rating will also be replaced by a rating of “requires improvement” in a bid to improve teaching.

Everyone struggles with some amount of anxiety when taking a test like the GMAT, but some people struggle more than others. Stress can also affect your preparation before you ever get to the test center – if you’re too stressed out when studying, that will hurt your ability to make and recall memories. So what can we do to reduce studying and test-taking stress?

Know what’s coming

If you haven’t already, read the first blog post in this series:In It To Win It. The nutshell: you’re not trying to get everything right. Nobody gets everything right, including me and other 99^th percentile testers!

If you have the right attitude going into the test, that will help significantly. I like to pretend that I’m playing tennis. Nobody expects to win every single point in a tennis match – that’d be silly. But I do expect to win more points than my opponent, and I don’t stress out when I lose some points.

You will of course need to know what’s coming in terms of the formulas and rules and so on. But also know that you’re not going to know everything and that’s okay.

Manage your time well

When people try to get everything right, they often mess up the timing. Discovering that you’re behind on time just compounds your stress and makes everything worse, so we have to know how to manage time well all the way through the test. We also need to know what to do if we find ourselves in trouble on the timing.

Read this time management article and start incorporating its recommendations into your study right away.

A Daily Telegraph investigation found evidence of exam boards seemingly giving teachers excessive guidance during seminars. 

John Wood, incoming chairman of the Independent Schools Association, said competition between major exam boards had damaged the “integrity” of the system.

He said it “cannot be right” that examiners can make money from selling advice to schools while also setting objective tests.

The comments came after a Daily Telegraph investigation into exam boards in England and Wales.

Last month, undercover reporters filmed senior examiners advising teachers at £230-a-day seminars about the exact wording that pupils should use and which questions they could expect.

Ofqual is now investigating the role of the advice sessions amid fears teachers are being given unfair help. It could lead to them being abolished or subjected to new regulations.

When most business school candidates read an essay question, they interpret it quite literally. For example, when Kellogg asks applicants to “Briefly assess your career progress to date. Elaborate on your future career plans and your motivation for pursuing an MBA. (600-word limit),” many applicants assume that they must answer each subquestion within the broader question in the exact order in which they were asked. However, this is not true. Such questions are indeed quite flexible, and at times, by pursuing your own structure, you can truly engage your reader.

We have found that with regard to overrepresented candidates who have unique professional goals, one strategy that can be quite helpful is to lead with goals instead of professional history. After all, “typical” experience is not as captivating as unusual (but realistic!) ambitions. So, the Indian technologist who intends to open a boutique hotel or the male investment banker who aspires to start a competitive windsurfing circuit can use these bold goals to stand out from the start.

Again, we emphasize that such candidates need to have (and show!) a compelling connection to their goals, and we do not suggest that overrepresented candidates strive to imagine or create “wild” goals just to catch the admissions committees attention. However, if you have a profound connection to an unusual goal, then reordering the question and ensuring that your goals are out front can make a difference.

The British Social Attitudes survey found that 54 per cent believed unemployment benefits were too high 

It’s a funny thing, when the prevailing culture suddenly shifts: you can feel it in the air, as when our bizarrely balmy autumn suddenly dipped into a bone-chilling December. Its first symptom is a kind of subtle mass amnesia, in which people start to blurt out rather harder-edged statements than you have heard them utter before, such as: “I’ve never believed that our welfare state can afford to shell out as much as it does”; or “I always thought the euro was an awful idea”. A brief query flits across your mind – “Did you really always think that?” – but they seem perfectly confident that they did.

According to the British Social Attitudes Survey, the populace appears to be drifting to the Right. Nine years ago, 63 per cent of people supported tax increases to pay for public services such as health and education; today, it’s less than a third. If the Labour years demonstrated the boundless appetite of public services for money, the people are demanding the fitting of a gastric band.

We are increasingly suspicious of state intervention: 75 per cent believe that the gap between rich and poor is too wide, yet only 35 per cent think ministers should take steps to redistribute wealth. Fewer people care about environmental issues, particularly if it hurts their pockets, and 54 per cent believe that unemployment benefit is too high.

Most Britons have long divided the able-bodied jobless into two morally distinct categories, the unlucky job-seekers and the long-term loafers, and I don’t think sympathy for the former has evaporated. It is simply that workers are feeling the financial pinch themselves, and are aware that the national piggy-bank is not only empty, but surrounded by balled-up final demands.

If anything, logic would dictate that, in a contracting economy, we should be more soft-hearted towards the jobless: after all, it might be us soon. But logic is not the main player here: anxiety is. And anxiety’s instinctive reckonings are accurate. Over time, the state will have to shrink, because no one can afford to let it keep expanding, like some morbidly obese lodger gobbling up the household’s supply of food. As George Osborne announced in his Autumn Statement, Britain will have to borrow an extra £111 billion over the next five years. We’re making strenuous efforts to economise, but still living on tick, watching neighbours fall into even worse predicaments, and praying that the bailiffs don’t get impatient any time soon.