To anyone who knows me, it will come as no surprise that I am about to moan about the teaching of subjects like English. I really hate English lessons.

What annoys me, though, is that I also really love writing, and I used to really love English lessons. This seems wrong.

It is.

Teaching really shouldn't make people hate something that they used to love, it should fill them with awe and fascination at what they have yet to discover, and make them itch to know more. Okay, so maybe I'm being a little optimistic, but I really do believe in it, or something similar.

The root cause, from where I'm standing, is the target based, exam driven model taken on by our modern education system. Now I can see the problems faced by the examiners and by the teachers, and I'm not saying I have an answer, but something's got to change somewhere.

Going back to the title of this post, it's very difficult to mark and compare in a creative art without some element of bias. Pretty much all impressions of art, writing and music are purely opinions, and opinions are hugeley subjective; they're dependant on context, culture and personal taste.

The options for the examiners? There are two main ones:

• a 'vote', taking the average mark awarded by a crowd of different markers, mostly eliminating personal bias
• a set of artificial guidelines that entrants are forced to adhere to
  in order to recieve marks, thus eliminating much of the creative part
  of a creative subject

Obviously, the second is the one the exam boards have settled on.

It's understandable. Exam papers are expensive to mark, and take time to moderate and check thoroughly. Just imagine how long it would take to get your grades back if the papers had to be marked by upwards of five to ten people! At the same time, without guidelines as to what you are supposed to write about and the style you should use, the papers are even harder to mark well. But even so, it's not good enough.

Current GCSE English courses seem to consist of the attitude that you pretty much know how to write well before you even start, and you spend the majority of the course learning how to write in the exact way that the examiner is looking for.

In fact, this problem permeates even into subjects that should supposedly be immune from this sort of thing, such as the sciences. Targets for improvement have driven teachers to teach to the exam rather than the science: you are told what the examiner wants to hear rather than the full, generally accepted, scientific explanation. Thankfully it would be virtually impossible for this to happen in Maths, but that seems to be an exception, sadly.

However you try to approach it, there is a fundamental problem in trying to distinguish from good and bad in a subject where, almost by definition, there is no right answer and no wrong answer.

As I said, I'm not saying I have an answer. What I am saying is that we need to look more closely at how these subjects are taught and examined - this is intended as a proposition for debate, not a rant.