UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg offers this thought:

All parents have a responsibility to nurture the potential in their children. I know how difficult it can be to find the time and the energy to help with homework at the end of a busy day. But if we give them that kind of attention and support when they are young, they will feel the benefits for the rest of their lives.

He singled out universities as riven by "educational apartheid", dominated by students from better-off homes.

Today we sit here twitching with fear as we await the latest Crawf AS-level exam results. How have we done as parents? Have we passed the Clegg Test?

I was brought up in a family which had never had a university graduate – back in the mid-1900s university was still very much a privilege for the better-off. But we had books. Indeed, my mother’s house still has books. In boxes, on shelves, in piles. Masses of books, all read at one point or other but now gathering forlorn dust.

Books from that period were written in the pre-Internet and digital publishing age, by people trained in Victorian/Edwardian values of scholarship and rather heavy style. To me now most of them are unreadable. But who will want them?

By contrast books now are so much better presented; lively in style and design. We keep buying them, as I found my Sony Reader far too clunky to use and I have not yet got round to a Kindle or iPad.

So, for example, try this excellent book about prime numbers which I was reading last night:

Beautifully written, accessible to non-mathematicians, explaining vast and subtle things in a gripping way. Buy it.

Otherwise Crawf Minima is ploughing through the Moomintroll stories:

And I am reading her I, Robot by Isaac Asimov:

Every schoolgirl needs to know the Three Rules of Robotics. Forget the silly film. These stories written decades ago are fascinating for their moral content and technical prescience in so many ways. But see too their failure to spot that once humans can create brilliant robots, they also will have worked out how to do away with heavy robot manuals when they go wrong. 

My father’s principle was simple. If you want a book, we’ll get it. That’s the same way we do things. Hence a lot of books round our house. Including even this dubious specimen:

We don’t drink much or smoke. Spare cash goes into this sort of thing. Does that give young Crawfs an edge in life, or at least a keen intellectual curiosity and pleasure in the unexpected and difficult? I hope so. 

Stop Press   News just in. 7 Maths AS Levels taken this year. Marks from 90-100% in five of them. Yo.