In the week before English schools closed for the summer, three educational news items grabbed the national headlines.  This is not especially remarkable in itself: English education has been in a state of revolution for years, and unsettling stories that reflect the unsettled state of our universities, colleges, and schools are featured almost daily in our papers.  The crisis in teacher recruitment; the outrage of children having to be sent home because their schools do not have sufficient funds to pay enough teachers to teach them full-time; the panic at the drop in numbers studying math, science, or languages; the absurdity of expanding universities to and beyond the point at which they cease to be universities at all, except in the sense that they are universally accessible to the talented and the untalented alike; the question of how such an expansion can be paid for; the psychological, intellectual, cultural, and financial strain of maintaining a target-driven system that is so top-heavy with testing that it stumbles under the burden of self-justification: These and countless other educational problems are constantly reported in the English press.  It’s all too much.  Education is a bore; a chore; a turn-off.  And the three stories that popped up alongside one another in July show that it is also a failure.

The first report was of such comic absurdity that it would have provoked cascades of ironic laughter in every state- school staff room in the land if such places still contained teachers with the energy needed to laugh.  On July 8, the Guardian published the results of research conducted by the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (a traditional university, not one of the rash of reclassified technical colleges that have recently been granted university status) demonstrating that the government’s schools inspection service, the Office for Standards in Education (known by the ugly near-acronym Ofsted) has had “no positive effect on examination achievement.”  Moreover, the report continues, “If anything, it [has] made it worse.”  The joke is that, though schools have complained at Ofsted’s disruptive, threatening, confidence-sapping and crudely judgmental invasions for the ten years of its existence, successive Tory and New Labour governments have declared such inspections indispensable.  Politicians of both main parties have characterized the inspectors as heroic standard-bearers in the battle for educational standards and have consistently claimed that, though the Ofsted medicine might seem unpalatable, it has been not just a tonic but a lifesaver.  Such claims are now shown to be nonsense.  It has become clear that the billions of photocopied pages of policy documents, management plans, and statistical data that were generated to be crammed into the hell’s-mouthed maw of the Ofsted paper monster might just as well have been fed into the shredder.  It is now evident that, had that dragon been slain at birth, tens of thousands of good, bad, or indifferent teachers who opted for early retirement rather than to continue to teach with Ofsted’s pestiferous breath on their necks would still now be in service, and the exam scores achieved by their pupils would be as much as one half of a percentage point better.  It is now obvious that, had the £197 million of taxpayers’ money that is spent every year on Ofsted been spent on paying the salaries of teachers, no school would ever have been forced to operate on a four-day week to stay in budget—and no child would have got lower examination grades as a result.

A less arrogant government might have been embarrassed by such a revelation, but this one knew that it only had to brazen it out for a few days before the story would be buried by an announcement that would put it—and any consideration of its significance—in the shade.  On July 12, Mike Tomlinson, the educational expert whose previous role was—wait for it—head of Ofsted and chief inspector of schools, published the results of his wide-ranging review of examinations and qualifications in English schools.  His recommendation: that almost everything is to be changed, and changed out of all recognition.  Asked to point the way to the nation’s educational future, he responded with the wisdom of the Norfolk bumpkin asked for directions to Norwich by a stranger: “Well,” says the rustic, “I wouldn’t start from here.”

Tomlinson’s recommendations are so revolutionary (they include replacing all existing tests and examinations with a wide-ranging four-level diploma) that attention was immediately focused on what is to come rather than on why he had been asked to make his review in the first place, which was because the previous system had collapsed under ever-increasing political pressure.  The breaking point came last year, when one of the country’s largest examination boards shifted the goalposts to reduce the number of A’s that students had objectively achieved because it was anxious not to displease the government by giving the impression that their examinations were not hard enough.  In the summer of remarking and recrimination that followed, public confidence in the whole examination system was lost.  Tomlinson was asked first to report on that disaster in particular and, in the light of what he found, on the examination system in general.  The government has been quick to embrace the recommendation that the educational edifice be leveled and rebuilt to a new and more modern design but chooses to forget that the building would never have become so unstable in the first place had they not pumped into it the self-proliferating, parasitic spores of the utilitarian educational heresy.

They are as nothing, however, compared to the canister of poison that a group of government-appointed experts now wants to drop through the roof vents of every primary-school classroom in Britain.  The day before the Tomlinson report was publicized, the Independent Advisory Group on Teenage Pregnancy delivered its annual report to Parliament, calling for the introduction of compulsory sex education for five-year-olds.  No, you have not misread that last sentence; yes, it beggars belief.  It should not, however.  Such a policy is entirely consistent with the targets-and-testing philosophy that has turned English education into a system designed to fulfill government objectives without regard to what might be appropriate for children.  In this case, the target is a 50-percent reduction in the teenage conception rate by 2010; the means chosen to try to meet it, forcing the tiniest of children to try to grow up at a speed that the government chooses to dictate.

The proposal is as stupid as it is wicked.  The group wants to impose a legally binding (and Ofsted inspected!) curriculum that sets out precisely what should be taught and when, but anyone with even the most elementary understanding of children knows that individuals develop sexual awareness at very different rates.  The group says that, by the time all pupils have reached the age of seven, they should be able to “compare the external parts of the human body” and “share their feelings.”  What either of these requirements might mean is anybody’s guess, but some of the best guesses are likely to be made by those who have seen the education packs that were introduced in Scotland in 2001, one of which invites five-year-olds to identify the clitoris on a drawing of the human body, while another suggests that a suitable homework task for 11-year-olds would be to visit a pharmacy and purchase some contraceptives.

Other practices timetabled for description need not be mentioned here and certainly should not be introduced into the imaginations of prepubescent youngsters.  Of course, there is a proper time and place for appropriate sex education, just as there are proper times and places for appropriate sex itself.  Anyone who has seen anything of developments in U.K. schools over the last couple of generations, however, will know that the ministry of education is the last place you should go to seek guidance about what is  appropriate for children.

“Poppycock!” cry the contemporary educational pundits.  “This is the government that has just created the post of Minister for Children!”  Precisely.  The first person to hold that office is Margaret Hodge, a career politician who presided over the Stalinesque London Borough of Islington until some dozen or so years ago,when she won notoriety by failing to respond appropriately to repeated claims—later proved correct—that widespread sexual abuse was being visited upon children in the borough’s care.  Reminded of the consequences of her poor judgement in this case, Mrs. Hodge argued that her past failures make her an ideal candidate for her new post, as she has learned from her mistakes.  It is not an argument likely to persuade the scores of children that were passed from pervert to pervert while she was responsible for their care.  The rest of us, meanwhile, wonder how anyone at all can be a credible advocate for the rights and interests of children when his or her line manager is the government official in charge of the country’s greatest sustained assault on the very condition of childhood: Her Majesty’s secretary of state for education.