According to the Tomlinson report, teachers and examiners did not have a clue as to the relative weight they should attach to the two exams – AS and A2s The QCA is to blame here again. It failed to give exam boards enough information about grade criteria and did not even run a pilot of the A2 units – with the results that examiners had nothing on which to base their judgements this year.Yesterday Ms Morris accepted responsibility for the way the new exam system had been introduced. However, she said she took pride from the fact the reforms “had transformed what was a narrow sixth-form curriculum into a broader one for youngsters”.The QCA is picking itself up from the floor after the exit of Sir William and pinning its hopes on its new Australian chief executive, Dr Ken Boston, who arrived in the country to take up his post just two weeks ago, to resurrect its tarnished image.The background that emerged in Mr Tomlinson’s report does not give one much confidence that all the mistakes that are in the system will be ironed out in time for next year.Some changes are inevitable. For instance, the way Sir William seems to have struck the fear of God into the chief examiners and has been interpreted by them as the voice of Government must never happen again.The best way of ensuring that happens is to break up the QCA. It should never have been both responsible for designing the system and checking on whether it was running smoothly.

That created an unhealthy climate in which there was pressure to sweep mistakes or problems under the carpet.Its regulating role should be hived off to an independent body so that parents regain confidence in the system.Only two boards look to have reacted to the pressure: the Oxford and Cambridge and RSA board and the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance.. Tony Martinez, actor and bandleader: born San Juan, Puerto Rico 27 January 1920; married (two sons, three daughters); died Las Vegas 16 September 2002. The Puerto Rican-born bandleader-turned-actor Tony Martinez played Sancho Panza in 2,245 performances of the musical Man of La Mancha on tour in the United States and on Broadway, but he reached his biggest audience as the Mexican farmhand Pepino Garcia in the television sitcom The Real McCoys. Pepino “came with the house”, as one character put it, and referred to the McCoy patriarch as “Se?Grandpa”.The sitcom became one of the most popular on American televison and was a forerunner to others such as The Beverly Hillbillies.Born in Puerto Rico in 1920, Martinez – who played five instruments and sang – studied music in the country’s capital, San Juan, then moved to New York to train in acting at the Juilliard School.

Later, he studied at the Pasadena Playhouse and landed small roles in the Hollywood films Angel on the Amazon (a melodrama set in the South American jungle, 1948), Barricade (a western starring Dane Clark and Raymond Massey, 1949), The Ring (a Mexican-American boxing yarn, 1952), Second Chance (a Mexican-set romance starring Robert Mitchum and Linda Darnell, 1953) and The Naked Dawn (a bandit crime caper, again set in Mexico, 1955).He had formed a band, Tony Martinez and His Mambo-USA, in New York during the 1940s and wrote songs for Mexican films such as El Cicl?el Caribe (1950), Mar?Cristina (1951) and La Ni?opoff (1951). Martinez gained wider exposure when he and his band performed in the legendary American film musical Rock Around the Clock (1956), starring Bill Haley and His Comets and marking the arrival of the rock ‘n’ roll phenomenon.Martinez was chosen for the role of Pepino in The Real McCoys after the writer-producer brothers Norman and Irving Pincus saw him and his band playing in a club on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip.The comedy was based around Grandpa’s inability and unwillingness to use modern technology and was a hit with viewers, despite initially baffling critics. In 1962, the series moved from the ABC network to CBS and Amos’s elder grandson, Luke (Richard Crenna), became a widower himself following the death of his wife Kate (Kathleen Nolan). Martinez appeared in most of the 224 episodes.He subsequently guest-starred in episodes of the American series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1965) and F Troop (1966), and was reunited with surviving members of the sitcom two years ago in The Real McCoys Reunion (2000).In 1967, he first played Sancho Panza in Man of La Mancha, the stage musical based on Cervantes’s 16th-century stories, in a national company tour, then on Broadway (the role had originally been taken, Off-Broadway, by Irving Jacobson). Martinez returned to the part in two Broadway revivals, in 1977 (with Richard Kiley reprising his performance as Don Quixote) and 1992 (starring Raul Julia as Quixote and featuring Sheena Easton as Aldonza).Martinez was also executive director of both the Puerto Rican government’s Artists Variety Co, which helped those with show-business ambitions, and its film commission, the Institute of Motion Pictures He lived out his retirement in Las Vegas.Anthony Hayward. Barbara Bishop, archaeologist and museum curator: born London 19 February 1945; assistant, Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, University College London 1965-75, Assistant Curator 1975-84, Curator 1984-97, Research Curator 1997-2002; married 1965 Robert Adams; died London 26 June 2002.

Barbara Adams was one of the most respected scholars of Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egypt. She was for over 36 years a curator at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at University College London, which houses probably the most important collection in the world for those periods. In 1962 she became scientific assistant at the Entomology department of the Natural History Museum and then from 1964 in the sub-department of Anthropology, where she took a keen interest in archaeology. This led her to study for an extra-mural diploma from London University.In 1965 she joined the Petrie Museum as an assistant, rising to become research curator. The Petrie Museum will be for ever in her debt because it was Adams who reorganised the museum completely. She played a fundamental role in the recording of the collection as well as its conservation. Between 1986 and 1988 she arranged the storage of the museum artefacts during renovation works and, on the occasion of its reopening, organised and launched the Friends of the Petrie Museum.Her efforts were crowned by the recognition in 1998 of the Petrie Museum as a museum of national importance, something which pleased her enormously.