An educational dystopia

TEACHING HAS BEEN A LIBERAL-LEFT profession for many years. Irrespective of which sector you work in, there is, in many staff rooms, a strongly expressed dislike of discipline, rules and formal examinations. One only needs to look at the dreary motions tabled for the April National Education Union conference to see the familiar calls for abolishing Ofsted, league tables, GCSEs and any other formal testing.

To an outsider this would be surprising given that without any one of these, running a school would, quite quickly, be almost impossible. And they would be right: we only have to look at the confusion that secondary schools have been plunged into following the scrapping of GCSE and A level examinations this year to see that, blunt tools though they are, end-of-year assessments are more consistent and objective methods for evaluating attainment than anything teachers can come up with themselves.

But experience and common sense don’t stop the many educational idealists from dreaming of a