Within moments of the class receiving my latest handout, I was getting the familiar “Was it YOU who cut along the edges, Mr Petty?” The criticism then became more overt: had I perhaps been “on the vodka” at the time? Should I consider going to a well-known high-street optician’s?

The content of the sheet scarcely mattered. I may have spent hours devising the most stimulating and imaginative learning material in creation, yet the only important thing in their eyes was that my edge-trimming (required to enable A4 paper to be glued flat into exercise books) had failed to keep the margins straight.

Admittedly, it was not the first time I had fallen foul of the guillotine. Those sloping margins are usually due to my being in a frantic rush, usually due to another frustrating delay at the neighbouring photocopying machine - another tale of constipation in some remote bend in its intestines. By the time all the sheets are finally evacuated and ready for the guillotine, I no longer have the time or inclination to care too much about cutting neat 90-degree angles. 

Trimming turns into brutal execution and I sometimes make the additional mistake of asking the guillotine to cut through three times as many sheets as it can normally cope with. This causes the edge of the sheets to be torn straight rather than cut straight, forming the kind of soft serrated edge associated with medieval manuscripts. This is another personal worksheet trademark much celebrated by my students.

I could, of course, simply ask the students to do their own trimming. This is fine provided I don’t intend for any actual learning to happen for at least 10 minutes, given that the cutting then becomes their sole focus of attention. I could talk any old nonsense to the wall while they are trimming (in fact, have done so) and no one notices.

Marginal gains

Some teachers duck out of trimming completely by asking their classes simply to fold the sheet into quarters before glueing in. Folding is, of course, the road to ruin. Once it’s folded up, most students will never - ever - bother to unfold that sheet in the future, no matter how crucial to that future. 

But why does it have to be like this?  Why, after decades of this size mismatch, has no one thought to make that larger school exercise book big enough to accommodate A4 sheets? Alternatively, why has no one popularised a paper size that will fit inside exercise books?

Help is perhaps at hand. A colleague at my school has already copy-written a new size and is talking to interested parties. One day our life on the edge may become just that little bit easier - a very literal “marginal gain”. 

Consider the total amount of time this would save teachers across the country. The guillotine may have been used to terrible excess in the French Revolution but, in numerical terms, it was as nothing compared to the millions of wasteful A4 executions currently going on in schools. 

But the really worrying point here is that this particular problem has been literally staring us in the face for many decades. It has been a Donald Rumsfeld “known known”. There has been a relatively obvious, simple and affordable solution to this paper-exercise book mismatch and yet the system has been incapable of doing anything about it. So what are the chances of that same system ever addressing the much deeper and more challenging mismatch in education - between the traditional package currently offered in schools and what schoolchildren in the 21st century actually need? 

Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire

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