“I can’t wait.”

“Just give me a few seconds to pour a bottle of vinegar over it first.”

That is precisely the manner of several education initiatives. The first half of each announcement creates excitement, followed by a groan for the second half. It reminds me of the childhood game inventing a ‘hurrah!’

followed by a ‘boo!’.

“There’s a new timetable out.”

“Hurrah!”

“But we’ve got Mr Periwinkle for maths.”

“Boo!”

“Still, there’s only one lesson today.”

“Hurrah!”

“But it’s maths and it lasts all day.”

“Boo!”

There have been a number of these barmy second-half initiatives recently. The announcement about more classroom assistants was followed by the news that they would teach lessons entirely on their own, while teachers sat in the staffroom preparing their classroom assistant’s next lesson (surely some mistake?).

Then there was the proposal that teachers be given more time for preparation and marking, with the corollary that they had to prepare an individual lesson for every child they taught (what, 150 a day?); or the ludicrous suggestion that what we really needed was world-class tests, but there would be one at the age of 17, when pupils were already buried under AS and A2 examinations.

It is as if there is a good fairy and a bad fairy, one bestowing gifts, the other sowing mayhem. The good fairy offers the distillation of best practice and a vision for the future, whereupon the bad fairy, bearing the hallmark of the Prime Minister’s private wheeze factory, pours a load of unwanted oil over it.

Some of the daftest ideas have emerged from the Number 10 wheeze mill and the views of its focus groups, leaving the stains to be laundered thereafter. Following all the press hype, long-suffering professionals have to sweep up the dung, like those circus workers who rush into the arena with bucket and spade after the elephant act.

The entirely unnecessary 17+ test is a good example. This Advanced Extension You Need Like A Hole In The Head But It’s Really Hard And It’ll Do You Good Examination, or whatever it was called, would have caused chaos if it had been forced on to AS and A2 candidates.

Before it quietly disappears into the dustbin of history, the man with the big bucket and spade will patiently try introducing distinction marks, or an A* grade, any old caper to save face. Just imagine if candidates need a three A* slate to get into medical school in future. A fat lot that will do towards widening access for the underprivileged. Moreover, it will make profiles such as ABB look like failure.

The latest double-barrelled wheeze is to strengthen discipline in schools (hurrah!), by putting police officers in them to deal with truants (eh?). I have met many excellent police officers, committed professionals, good at handling difficult young people, but isn’t their presence in school to catch truants somewhat illogical? Truants are conspicuous by their absence, so is the poor bobby supposed to shout “There’s an empty desk, arrest that chair”?

The worst feature of these Number 10 policy unit addenda is that they are always accompanied by enormous press hype in which the word’tough’

inevitably figures. Tough action will be taken, tough targets will be set, tough examinations will be introduced. No flies on us, sunshine.

It is the criminalmedical analogy, in the angry parent mode of Margaret Thatcher. She once said, to those anxious about high unemployment and her punitive style: “The stated dose has not been exceeded”, as if we were all sick patients. The Book of Kings described this authoritarian model perfectly: “My father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.”

Well let the same logic be applied to medicine. Tough action will be taken to cure people. Gallstones, useless appendices, rotting teeth will simply be wrenched out, no anaesthetic. Hospital patients will sleep in tough beds with open windows in winter and no bedclothes, while tough toilets will be situated across a yard half a mile away. Tough nurses will slap them around the face each morning with broken bottles.

It is time the bad fairy took a long holiday, or got a real job (hurrah!). There is something demeaning about having a system of education fuelled by anonymous focus groups and driven so strongly from a remote and anonymous centre (boo!). Focus groups and the Number 10 policy unit would never have imagined or invented the silicon chip, bypass surgery, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. So tough on bad fairies, tough on the causes of bad fairies.