It is one of those wonderfully, blindingly obvious initiatives. Why should children always, relentlessly, all through the week, have to turn subjects on and off at 40-minute intervals?

Why should they be forever thundering along corridors to different classrooms, or in earlier years waiting for a series of distraught teachers to thunder towards them, scattering folders, glasses, and cardigans as they go?

Why encourage the idea that you can get clear of your most hated subject if you can only struggle through the next 33 minutes, with artful distraction of the teacher and guaranteed red-herring questions - “Sir, is Beckham better than George Best was?”

Why let children grow up thinking that nothing need ever be concentrated on for longer than the span of dreaded Double Maths?

Why should your train of thought, the subtle progress of understanding of a new idea, be forever interrupted by the terrible clatter of desks, stuffing of bags and shoving in corridors, as the thumping feet of your less interested confr res dispel the idea which was just beginning to take beautiful new shape in the deep folds of your brain?

I know good teachers have as strong an instinct for the structure of a period and the passage of time as any broadcaster. I have watched them cleverly raising the intellectual temperature and then winding it down again to anticipate the bell.

But not all lessons can be so elegantly ordered. I can remember English periods where a poem was stopped in mid-reading by the shrilling of an electric bell and the banging of desks. And maths lessons when I had just begun to understand what the bloody bracket-things were for, when I had to stop and consider the Diet of Worms or demonstrate Osmosis Using Two Eggs.

There were religious education lessons when you were just getting to the nub of the matter of papal infallibility, with the teacher-nun defensively backed into a corner, and she was saved from defeat by yet another damned bell.

Life doesn’t break into equally-sized pieces. Why should school?

The Leasowes experiment seems a modest advance. One day a week, Friday, is devoted to a five-hour block of teaching in which groups can be brought in and out at different levels, visiting artists or science demonstrators used most profitably, and large projects completed.

Complicated Meccano can be set up to demonstrate maths principles, and not tidied away. Or else the theme day can be used for an outside trip. But always the principle is there that on Fridays the bitty, stressful, scuttling pace of school life is altered. Not to something slower, but to something different and more coherently purposeful: a piece of real life.

Leasowes, according to the TES report, is communicating the idea and has got one other school going down the same road, and another likely to. But it is interesting that the headteacher, John Howells, says that even though he shows the ropes to many interested schools, few actually do it.

Of course it’s an act of faith. All these learning-centred, innovative, blue-sky initiatives always are acts of faith. The interesting thing is to see how far a modern school, with all the grinding centralist pressures on its day, can be flexible enough to take these leaps, and think from the ground up.

Presumably Leasowes must opt out of the new secondary literacy hour requirement for its Fridays. Clearly this is possible. But the more standardisation that is imposed, the harder it gets for heads to have ideas and, in the words of Greg Dyke, cut the crap and make it happen.

When I heard about the adventurous Meccano projects at Leasowes, I was, depressingly, reminded of a complaint from a four-year-old. His nursery school mentors were anxious to fulfil every corner of the “pre-school curriculum”. Whenever he was just getting involved in a model of his own devising, he was made to put it away and join the prescribed Japanese-style session of chanting letters and numbers. “Usually” said the child glumly, “the model gets broken up when you put it on the shelf. I never finish my garage that I want to make, and I have to start again.”

So good on Leasowes. And thank God for a chief inspector who is happy to applaud ideas that look a bit different and weren’t his. Let the green shoots flourish in every crack between the dead, heavy flagstones of the system.