Education Secretary Michael Gove’s shake-up of the GCSE exam system has rightly been met with anger and derision.

There can be no doubt that young people need to be prepared for the world of work or that standards and exam results need to be improved, but Mr Gove’s ham-fisted, dogmatic approach is almost guaranteed to make the situation far worse.

The plans he announced yesterday, apart from some fairly pointless messing about with the names of grades, enforce a radical change in the way children study and the method for measuring their progress and achievement. Essentially, in future, students will cease to be taught in modules or assessed by testing as they go along.

Instead, they will be forced to follow a two-year course with all exams taken at the end. “Just the way it used to be,” older readers may say – and that’s exactly the point: Mr Gove’s idea for improving results is to look back at the past through rose-tinted spectacles and revert to the way it was when he was at school.

Ignoring, of course, that that past system was replaced for many good reasons, not least of which that all children learn at a different rate and not all of them can cram in and retain two years’ worth of information when it comes to exam time.

As a result, more children will fail their GCSEs and many very capable and very intelligent young people will be barred from getting jobs or going to university because their memories don’t function in the way Mr Gove thinks they should.

Yet again, he has got it wrong and it’s our children and grandchildren who will pay.