GCSEs start today, as those of you with 16-year-old children will hardly need reminding. So, are we panicking? I can truthfully say that we are not. And before you cast the paper aside in a rage, assuming that my GCSE candidate is one of the charmed band of golden youth whose pictures will appear on the front pages in mid-August, brandishing their clean sweep of A*s, hang on, because he ain't.

My son, luckily for him, gets his looks and temperament from the other side of the family. What I contrived to pass on was the bad fairy's gift of being good at just one thing. If I had produced a one-trick pony whose one trick was to be exceptionally good at music, sport, maths or drama, all might have been well. But if your one good thing happens to be English (or any of the arts subjects except music), forget it. Any fool can read and write.

Ages ago, when I was taking my O levels, my own extreme skewing towards linguistic fluency at the expense of everything else didn't seem to matter very much. That was in the bad old days of the 11+, when kiddies were cast on to the scrapheap of life before they were even into adult shoe sizes. Thank goodness politicians of all parties have set their faces against such cruel and wasteful educational policies.

Somehow I passed the 11+ and went to grammar school, where I gained a dismal clutch of what would now be B and C grades at O level. I took A levels and Oxford entrance and, having passed the latter, no one - least of all the university - seemed very bothered when I gained an iffy set of A levels. It seemed that being good at reading and writing was a charm strong enough to convince Miss Trickett, the formidable principal of St Hugh's college, to overlook my abysmal ignorance of valency, quadratic equations, the life cycle of the tapeworm, terminal moraines and so on.

Fast-forward to the autumn term of 2007, when schools with good academic reputations and an eye to the league tables began to warn the parents of dozy, idle or otherwise underperforming pupils that their offspring had better sharpen up if they wanted to proceed to the sixth form. It is the educational equivalent of the torturers' custom of showing their victims the instruments to concentrate their minds, and by God it worked on me.

With the mad energy born of dread, I set about trying to cram my one-trick pony into the approved mould of the good all-rounder. I organised timetables and set about coaching him in the subjects of which I retain a smattering of knowledge. The candidate continued to apply himself with immense energy to writing a footballing fiction along the lines of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, at which he was making better progress than I was with the book I had been commissioned to write (because I was devoting all my energy to getting him through his GCSEs).

As a last resort, I took to describing in lurid terms the future to which he could look forward if he failed to clear the GCSE hurdle: collecting trolleys at Sainsbury's while his contemporaries went on to A levels, degrees, good jobs, mortgages and glory. And don't think, I added, that you can doss about here for the rest of your life, writing books at my expense. At this the candidate looked up from his book with a pained expression. I think it was the contemptuous spin I'd put on “writing books” that surprised him, given that that's what I spend half my time doing, in a house infested with literature.

“Er, Mum,” he said. “What did you get in your O levels?” I told him. As it happens, my grades and his predicted grades are almost identical. But it was different then, I added. You can't get away with that sort of thing any more. As I said it, a sort of clarity dawned, as though the frenzy of the preceding months had suddenly lifted. I sent the candidate upstairs to revise and sat down to think.

Of course it is wrong to write off children at 11, and of course the rise in educational aspiration and the opening up of tertiary education to students who might not, a decade ago, have considered it is marvellous. And we all know that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Still, I find myself worrying about those eggs. Children - especially boys - mature intellectually at different stages. Some will thrive at GCSE, others won't develop their full potential until A level or even beyond. Some will have specialisms so marked as to make it impossible for them ever to be good all-rounders - and yet, as I was briskly told by the head of a mid-league school, anyone without excellent GCSEs hasn't a hope of gaining a place at a decent university.

The State cannot, of course, run an educational system that privileges the odd, the quirky or the unusual. Nevertheless, I find myself wondering what is so enlightened about a system that, having all but eliminated selection at 11, quietly enforces it at 16 by favouring the generalist above the specialist so markedly that late bloomers may (unless very lucky or blessed with very rich parents) find themselves blighted for life at 16.

It is hard for me, the lucky late bloomer, to envisage a life that doesn't involve a university education. But in that horrible moment when I heard myself talking about books with contempt I realised how far from sanity I had allowed myself to drift in response to the demands of the league tables. If my son opens his GCSE results to discover that the grades that took me to Oxford won't admit him to a sixth form, I refuse to think of him as a failure. As far as I'm concerned, he can sit about reading and writing at my expense for as long as he likes, so long as he's working hard at something he really cares about. In reaching this conclusion I imagine that I am a late entry to a group of parents whose children can't be forced or cajoled into the GCSE starting stalls. I never thought I'd say it, but perhaps there is life beyond examinations.

Eavesdropping on the Ents
So I'm wondering what GCSEs the artist Alex Metcalf got to pursue a career in listening to the internal noises of trees. Unless you're a Lord of the Rings anorak (in which case you will be well aware that the mythical tree-herders, the Ents, were cured of dumbness by the Elves and thereafter conversed in Entish, a language so tediously convoluted that few could be bothered to understand it), you may have been under the impression that trees are, by and large, on the uncommunicative side. But at the Museum of Garden History in Lambeth Palace Road, SE1, Metcalf's installation, which opened yesterday and runs until May 12, is there to correct that idea. Eavesdropped on by means of Metcalf's listening device - a sort of dowager's ear trumpet, packed with un-dowager-like technology, trees are, apparently, astonishingly communicative, making a rumbling noise like the sound of a thunderstorm, which students of Tolkien will instantly recognise as Entish. Anyway, I note that Metcalf taught sailing in Cornwall for years before embarking on an MA at the RCA, which reinforces my newfound faith in the value of an eccentric education.

My model mare
It usually takes the auto-immolation of a domestic appliance to drive me to Bluewater. But now I'm making plans to go there voluntarily, since learning that the candidates for a vast statue in Ebbsfleet, overlooking the A2, are to go on show there from May 27. The proposals include three abstract sculptures, Rachel Whiteread's house on a recycled mountain and Mark Wallinger's white horse, inspired by the county symbol of Kent. As a Kent girl I naturally favour the horse. What's more, I heard on Radio 4's Front Row that Wallinger is looking for suitable models and, like the stage mother from Hell, I can't help feeling that my own grey mare, with her perfect conformation (and her stroppy nature mercifully invisible in monumental form) would make a lovely statue.

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