The parents of Sebastian Ponsonby say they are equally delighted at clinching the deal with IBM. ‘Whether it’s writing an essay on the Egyptians, or drawing a farmyard animal, it’s imperative that Sebastian always produces the most impressive homework assignment in his class. We are confident that IBM Global Services will keep us ahead of the game,’ said his father, Julian.

Julian Ponsonby decided to outsource the contract when he realised that his own efforts could no longer guarantee that his son’s homework assignment results would outshine every other child in Sebastian’s class. Pupils were asked to build a vehicle that could transport a 100g bar of chocolate. Eschewing the option to cobble together a car made out of a Weetabix box, with Pringle lids for wheels, Mr Ponsonby wanted to create the best car humanly possible. But whilst in talks with a CAD (computer assisted design) engineer, he hit on an idea.

‘Sebastian’s last homework assignment nearly broke me,’ he admitted. ‘But suddenly I thought, I’m already using the best technical support available to make sure my son destroys the competition. Wouldn’t it be more cost effective if I just outsourced the entire contract?’

When news of the Sebastian Ponsonby Homework Contract Tender was released, it caused a great deal of excitement in the IT industry and the stock markets. On winning the contract, IBM’s stock rose several points.

However, Sebastian may not have things all his own way for long. Accenture has been chosen to complete the homework for his arch rival, Joshua Simkins. ‘After meeting Joshua’s parents, we are confident that we are singing from the same song sheet, and we are going to create a new paradigm in homework completion,’ said an Accenture spokesman.

Simkins has also hired Snoop4U, a competitive intelligence company, to monitor the progress of rival homework projects. ‘It’s not enough to create the best homework assignment,’ said Simkins senior, ‘you’ve got to destroy the opposition.’

‘We’re going to blow the other guys out the water,’ said Simkins junior.

‘Quite frankly, the quality of some of this year’s intake has been appalling,’ he said. ‘We’ve had to retrain some of them in basic tasks, such as shoe detonation and liquid explosives.’

Many student ne’er do wells are attracted to more rewarding forms of anti-social behaviour, such as banking, he conceded. ‘When they see the havoc they can wreak as City traders, at the click of a mouse, it makes terrorism seem quaint,’ he said. ‘A career in terrorism requires hard work, discipline and training. But these kids can go into the City, and instantly screw up millions of lives, while earning huge bonuses at no risk to themselves.’

Another Al Qaeda trainer complained that the rewards of terrorism no longer appealed to today’s graduates, who want instant gratification. ‘Who wants to kill themselves for the promise of 72 sexually inexperienced partners, when a City trader gets instant rewards and can buy all the lapdancers he wants.’

Security experts believe that the UCL graduate was motivated by the bizarre notion that as a martyr he will have be granted of 72 virgins in heaven. ‘For the average Chemistry student, it still sounds more likely than them getting to have sex with a girl in this life.’

Hasan Nasarallah, leader of Hezbollah, says: ‘What we like about the Diploma is the emphasis on core skills like English, Maths and ICT, all of which are crucial at all levels of the organisation, from mastermind to disposable martyr. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had operations go pear-shaped because someone can’t work out the timing on a detonator or read a SatNav properly.’

Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Schools, says: ‘If our young people are to stand a chance of making their mark in an increasingly competitive global terrorism market then it is important they have the skills that terror groups are crying out for. It’s no longer enough to be recruited as a zealous amateur, and I’m delighted that many organisations from home and abroad are doing their bit to tackle the problem of Neets – young people not in employment, education or terrorism.

Osama Bin Laden, of Al-Qaeda, one of the blue chip terror groups already backing the Diploma, says: ‘We had this young guy – Zacharius Moussouai – one of the 9/11 bombers, who actually slept in and missed his plane! I mean, this is what we have to work with. We had to hold up our hands and say, ‘look, frankly, he’s a hanger-on and nutter’, which isn’t the sort of feedback anyone wants from our type of employer. If he wasn’t suicidal before…’

Bin Laden adds, ‘All we’re asking of the education system is good raw material; then we can get them into our own specialised training camps both here and in Pakistan to work on the increasingly specialised skills your average fundamentalist needs to get on. It’s giving young people the chance to travel, learn a trade and pick up transferable skills like making explosives from weed killer, and non-transferable skills like blowing themselves up in a busy market.’

Diplomas have proved controversial, with critics saying that take-up for the qualification remains relatively low.

Clive Marks, of the Confederation of British Industry, says: ‘Although we have largely avoided indiscriminate murder as part of our operational matrix, I think you have to agree that these terrorist groups are great at getting feckless, disaffected and vulnerable young people motivated. Already you’re starting to see a lot more interest in the Diploma in Terror Studies from young people who might never have considered a ‘jihad’ as a career path before.’

A spokesperson for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, who wished to remain anonymous for legal reasons, said: ‘I don’t think it matters if a teenager wants to wage holy war in the Middle East or join a White Supremacist camp in Oklahoma, the Diploma offers a variety of different paths to a diverse group of young people of all ages, genders and backgrounds. Young people can finally link what they are learning, in say, chemistry, with why they can’t get a bottle of Sprite through airport security.’

‘We didn’t have to go on the show,’ Ince insisted, ‘but we had a bit of a point to prove, didn’t we? Spoilt kids doing useless courses on pointless bloody crap…’

The team scored well on the Geography round with 29-year-old Jessop having visited every one of the Canary Islands silhouetted on the screen during his last winter cruise with his wife and three children. Basket-weaver Plant accurately quoted four lines from ‘Beowulf’, explaining later that she had used the poem to get her children to sleep at night. Self-confessed pub bore McKillop’s knowledge of The Smiths’ back catalogue eased them through the music round and Ince, the team captain, spent a lot of time mumbling why the voiceover man was saying ‘Maudlin’ instead of Magdalen and threatening to twat the puffin of the next person who looked at him like that. He answered nothing.

But he did express disappointment at not winning the round and going on to meet Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in the quarter-final. ‘What sort of a bloody stupid name is that for a college – aren’t they in the Muppets?’ he demanded. ‘I was looking forward to telling them precisely that, and I’m telling you, I wouldn’t have missed and hit the wall either, bunch of posh prats. Just because they get in to these places, it’s hardly going to equip them for real life, is it? I mean, what use is knowing Esperanto when most of these kids never set foot outside the Home Counties? And Philosophy degrees are worthless, aren’t they? Well, aren’t they? Or are they? Maybe they are…’

allmyownstunts

Examples of poor parental efforts were rife, not least as several signed their work ‘by Mum and Dad’. ‘There was a GCSE geography project on Town Planning that has come to exemplify the malaise that has set in over fake coursework since its heyday in the Nineties,’ said one examiner, who loves trying to make dirty words out of the available grades. ‘It started off well enough – I gave them the benefit of the doubt and assumed that the basic syntax errors were an attempt to emulate a 16-year-old’s grasp of the English language, not the work of an illiterate turd.

‘But barely was I two pages in, when the author stopped discussing the relative merits of building a shopping centre outside St Albans and started ranting about when the hell they were going to phase those traffic lights at the top of the high street and how they must have missed the area’s annexation by Poland. I still gave it a B. Those traffic lights are a bitch.’

As the average grades for fake coursework continue to plummet year-on-year, parents were quick to defend their falling academic achievements. ‘There’s just so much more pressure on parents these days,’ said Fran Andrews, who ruined her daughter’s chances of an A* by forgetting to take the internet links out of the Napoleon essay she downloaded on her behalf. ‘By the time you’ve lied about your address to secure the best primary school and then faked a whole religious faith to get into a good secondary, you barely have the energy to forge a decent Macbeth essay. But at the end of the day it’ll all be worth it. Like any caring parent, we just want the best shot at ultimately falsifying that means-tested student fees form.’

‘When Jamie arrived at school, I assumed the large cardboard box that had once contained a washing machine was being used to carry an elaborate costume’, explained Winnie Forbes, Jamie’s teacher, ‘but he then pointed to the large spooky face drawn in biro on the machine door and told me the box WAS the costume and he’d come as a haunted washer-dryer’.

The staff room fiercely debated the unusual fancy-dress with the ‘couldn’t be arsed’ camp noting that the machine featured on the packaging was a top of the range Miele, which would have set the parents back quite a bit, while the poverty group highlighted the fact that boxes from a nearby Curry’s are often dumped at the back of the local Lidl for people to use that can’t afford recyclable carrier bags, and this could have been the source of the outfit.

However the lazy camp countered by insisting that there’s plenty of poor kids that have better costumes, with their leading spokesman, Deputy Head Jane Thomas noting that the parents could have shoplifted a Transformers outfit like many other of the school’s disadvantaged parents had obviously done, and that the merely poor ‘would at least have bothered to cut out eyeholes so the wee lad could see where he was going’.

To finally settle the argument Jamie’s teacher, Miss Forbes, called his parents under the pretext of needing permission for him to bob for apples. The findings of the call left both sides claiming victory, however. According to a ‘mortified’ Mrs Whittam, Jamie’s Romanian nanny Jana had been specifically told to pick up an official Harry Potter wizard’s outfit, to be paid for out of the ‘ample’ £40 weekly allowance she was paid on top of her free accommodation. Mrs Whittam then promised to speak to Jana about appropriate childcare at their monthly meeting, before arranging to have Jamie collected from the teacher’s car park, and promising a donation to the school’s computers fund in recognition of their discretion in the matter.

‘Take Freshers week. During my first week at Hogwarts, I flew on a broomstick, had a wizarding duel with Draco Malfoy and was put in Gryffindor by the Sorting Hat. This week, I’ve been pushed around pissed in a Morrisons trolley, got in a fight with some squaddies and some smart-arse stuck a traffic cone on my head.’

With the wizarding world offering nothing in the form of higher education, Potter was forced to turn to muggle seats of learning to continue in his studies. ‘Looking back, perhaps if I’d spent less time fighting V****… oh sod it, Voldemort, and more on trigonometry, perhaps I could have aimed my sights a bit higher,’ said Potter, who was told after a recent psychometric test that he’d be well suited to a career in recruitment.

‘But at least I’m making the effort. Ron’s bricklaying apprenticeship isn’t going well – a building site is no place for a ginger – and I hardly hear from Hermione these days since she turned down her place at Oxford to pursue her model/actress career with some obscure film company called Cherry Pop Productions.’

Alan Parks, a private tutor hired to help Yoda had been working with him since he was a newly qualified teacher aged 23. Now 63 and coming up to retirement, he was overjoyed with his pupil’s success. ‘I am just elated, my whole career has been about this moment, Master Yoda just couldn’t get his sentence formulation cracked, but we got there eventually.’

Parks has every right to be elated, he is the 15th tutor hired by the Jedi Council to work with Yoda. ‘To be honest, his habit of putting sentences the wrong way round was getting a bit embarrassing,’ said Mace Windu, a member of the Council, ‘Whilst representing us in public his small stature and funny little green face went down a storm, but his patterns of speech left a lot to be desired.’ Parks worked with Yoda to break the bad habits and to instil a sense of calm. ‘Often it was the heightened expectations around Yoda that caused him to malform his sentences,’ said Parks, ‘he was nervous and he hated it when people laughed at him. We just worked on his confidence more than anything else and slowly we started to unravel the problem.’

Yoda received his GCSE result last week but wanted to keep the achievement quiet in order to avoid a fuss. ‘I just want to carry on like normal,” said Yoda today, “I really don’t want to draw any attention to this, I am like, ok, I’ve done this, I’ve passed, let’s move on. There are far more important things to be dealing with, such as the rebel alliance and that troublesome Darth Vader.’ It is thought that Yoda will not be taking his studies any further at the moment but may well look at A level English in a few years. ‘I would like to keep my hand in for sure, but for the moment, very pleased I am!’ he quipped.