I loudly applaud those parents who restrict access and viewing time during term time.”Many headteachers have complained that teenagers are experiencing “exam overload” under the new system, with extracurricular activities being squeezed out.Mr Hewett also complained that standards of grammar were in decline because pupils were being misled by incorrect examples featured on television programmes.He said: “Teaching the basic rules of grammar is made no easier when the media, particularly television, insist on programme titles without capital letters. It becomes more difficult to show examples of good practice as the traditional styles of writing are ditched in favour of the visually stimulating but incorrect. The decline may be gradual but it is decline nevertheless.”The Independent Schools Association is one of the five professional associations of heads within the Independent Schools Council. The association’s 290 member schools educate more than 70,000 pupils.. A teacher broke down in the witness box yesterday when he recalled the moment he was told that a pupil in his care had drowned during a school holiday in France. She was found dead a few hours later.Mr Duckworth, 47, a French teacher and group leader who had planned the paddling trip, denied claims that he had not taken action after being told by Jennifer Clagett, a pupil, that Gemma was in trouble.

“If I had thought for one moment somebody was in the water, I would have gone straight in to get them,” he told a jury at Leeds coroner’s court.Mr Duckworth said he had called back some of the pupils from Cockburn High School in Leeds as they began to stray, telling them to paddle rather than swim out to see.But Gemma’s absence was suddenly noticed as the children returned. “The first thing I did was look to the water to see if she was there. I could see nothing so I assumed Gemma had got out of the water and gone back to the hotel to get dry,” said Mr Duckworth, who has life-saving qualifications.A search of the hotel and beach ensued and the teacher called the emergency services “They told me somebody would come, but nobody did,” he said. He wept as he described the moment news of Gemma’s death was relayed to him.

“I was always hopeful until the fireman told me Gemma had drowned,” he said.Colin Richardson, the headteacher, denied receiving a letter from Gemma’s mother before the trip telling him her daughter could not swim The inquest continues.. David Geoffrey Williamson, genealogist: born Haywards Heath, Sussex 25 February 1927; FSA 1991; died London 21 April 2003. David Williamson would not have expected an obituary had he died in his middle years. For most of his early life, he was a solitary scholar working away at his chosen profession, that of the dedicated genealogist. Indeed, but for a change in attitudes which makes celebrities out of unusual characters, he might well have remained in dusty obscurity. Where Williamson had made his mark, unseen, unthanked, unacknowledged and no doubt badly and sporadically paid, was in the editorial work he had put into the 1952 edition of Burke’s Landed Gentry, a volume of immense importance to the genealogist, and to the 1953 edition of Burke’s Peerage.It is a curious thing about reference books that the image they create bears little relation to the way in which they are compiled.

I am not familiar with the editorial offices of Who’s Who or the sadly defunct Kelly’s Handbook, but I remember very clearly the dismal offices from which Burke’s operated in the early 1970s, the surroundings made tolerable only by the comprehensive shelves of early editions of their titles, the content of the filing cabinets, and the fascinating interleaved editions, which were updated daily to facilitate a new edition when the time was right.Unfortunately Burke’s attracted maverick editors such as L.G. Pine (who I recall getting a sound heckling at Eton when he addressed a group of 16-year-olds on the subject of blood sports – he listed all the sports he hated, to which a lone voice in the audience appended “clay pigeons” to a suitable roar from raucous supporters). I recall too his successor, Peter Townend, marriage broker between the impoverished old families and the new money of Mayfair, with his instant rattling off of a new acquaintance’s pedigree as if he were holding an equine auction at Newmarket.Williamson had toiled under these two, and worked on the three volumes of the Landed Gentry that appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Fortunately he survived to the new era created by Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, who, having ousted Townend from the editorial chair (the full horror of this is told in Massingberd’s Daydream Believer, 2001), launched an ambitious and for a time highly successful series of new genealogical tomes to revamp the Burke image.Massingberd was quick to see where Williamson’s talents lay and to give full vent to them.