If teacher training had been like this when I became a university tutor, I would have resigned and gone off to do something useful, like counting the grains of sand in the Sahara. Today’s PGCE students are committed, intelligent and imaginative, yet the requirements of the Government and its dreadful Teacher Training Agency assume that these people are Pavlov’s dogs. Here’s another box to tickI well done. Woof woof.

Teacher training should be liberated from this grotesque tyranny. It has gone on for far too long. Several years ago, there was a movement in the United States towards something known as ‘competency-based teacher training’. The assumption was that teaching could be atomised into thousands of discrete actions or competencies - “teacher can pick up stick of chalk”, “teacher can walk towards blackboard”, “teacher can go berserk and be escorted away by people in white coats”, “teacher can drink flagon of arsenic“I Like many other British teacher trainers at the time, I gleefully rejoiced at the lunacy of it. I was particularly amused by the name of one of the gurus of competency based teacher education, a man called Dodl. By one of those happy accidents, ‘Dodl’ is the Austrian dialect word for ‘idiot’. Tee hee, we all chortled, what would those Americans think up next - little realising that one day we too would be engulfed by the same follies.

The insane ticking of boxes, about which PGCE students rightly complain, is related to a much larger malaise in education. In recent years, governments have begun to mistrust public services. If you don’t trust people, you check up on them all the time, insist they write down everything they do, and inspect them to death.

This is precisely what has happened to teachers generally and to teacher training in particular. PGCE students preparing to teach primary and middle school pupils are required by the Teacher Training Agency to meet 851 competencies. Eight hundred and fifty-bloody-one. It is obsessive, complete and utter madness. Everyone knows this.

Just ignore them, I hear you say. Unfortunately, the consequences would be severe. One day a PGCE student is walking along a corridor, whistling a happy tune, when a manhole cover moves aside. Out leaps an Ofsted inspector crying: “What’s a phoneme?” or “Name an eleven-sided figure.”

If the student cannot answer, then the training institution is deemed to be ‘non-compliant’ and its funding is reduced. It may even be shut down. The very word ‘compliant’ illustrates the Stalinist system that we now have. In response, training institutions have to insist, against their better judgment, on students ticking the wretched boxes that will help to keep them alive. And to ensure compliance, teacher training is inspected to death.

In my own university, we have had inspections every year for the past seven years. Every single bloody year, more madness and a complete waste of public money. I once had 10 different inspectors in a single year. Each inspector was pleasant and I have always got very high ratings, but I still think the system is criminally barmy.

In the following session, my own son did our PGCE and was inspected by one of the same crowd. I asked if they did special offers for families, half price for kids, that sort of thing. He too was highly rated, but while he was observed with a class, the senior inspector was inducting a new inspector, who in turn was watching the school mentor, who was scrutinising the class’s regular teacher. Four grown-ups sat there like the judges at the end of a 100 metre sprint race. My son said he felt like the smallest piece of plankton at the end of the food chain. He completed the course but decided not to go into teaching.

Unfortunately, he is not alone. Nearly half the people who sign up for teacher training drop out before completing three years in a school. Yet we are desperately short of teachers. There could be no scheme better designed to put people off than to bore the pants off them at the point when they are at their keenest. It is absolutely criminal, but what should be the charge? Mental cruelty? Breaking (teachers’ spirit) and entering (their minds)? Or kidnapping? Or taking away imagination without the owner’s consent?

I hope PGCE students won’t blame their training universities for the crazy bureaucracy that has strangled their courses and made them unrecognisable as intelligent and civilised means of preparing the next generation. The Teacher Training Agency should be shut down, or perhaps kept open as a museum for visitors between 10 a.m. and noon, just to remind everyone how foolish it is to let a government agency prescribe what should be creative courses.

Can you imagine a football club run by the TTA and Ofsted? Each Saturday the team would spend the first half of the match sitting in the dressing room planning the second half. Sadly, when they eventually got out on to the pitch, they would find that they were already losing 55-0. But they would know all about the dimensions of the penalty area, have the neatest notebooks of any team in the league, and their club would be fully ‘compliant’, if useless. Next set of boxes please, Mr Pavlov. Woof woof.

Ted Wragg is professor of education at the University of Exeter