Is Britain's brightest A-Level student a boy or an anonymous photogenic teenage girl?

This one is as regular as clockwork on the currybet.net site - the A-Level results come out, and I start moaning about the depressing and sexist coverage of it - here's one I made earlier in 2003.

Who'd think that boys even took A-Levels these days?

And if teenagers do manage to perform well in the exams, well, then they are obviously worthless bits of paper anyway.

And everybody wonders why teenagers in Britain appear to suffer from low self-esteem and self-worth.

Even whilst the British media leap on any report that shows British teenagers are the 'worst' in Europe.

My favourite article from the online press to neatly illustrate my point about A-Levels today was this one from The Mirror.

It talks about "Gifted Jos Gibbons" - who only gets called 'gifted' after they've dropped into the opening paragraph that he "is thought to be an 18-year-old with Asperger's Syndrome" mind you.

And yes, I did say he.

But you wouldn't know that from the picture The Mirror chooses to illustrate the story with.

Posted by Martin Belam, August 16, 2007    
Read the latest posts about: Children and Teenagers, Daily Mirror, Media
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