He has thrown a strait-jacket of 19th- century academicism over an education system which needs radical reconfiguration to meet the challenge of the next millennium. He has leeched the interest and pleasure out of being with children and helping them to become independent thinkers.

He lacks any understanding of what happens in children’s minds when they go through the daily grind of school. For all those reasons he should be dismissed as soon as possible because he has been an educational disaster.

But to oust him because of a two-decades-old indiscretion will ensure only that he is replaced by another, more circumspect Government mouthpiece.

We need radical reform based on a thorough investigation of what children really need to live in the next millennium, not a prurient witch-hunt followed by more of the right-wing sloganising which seems to be a passport to preferment in education under this Government.

Christopher Shute Education Now 7 Kiln Way Polesworth, Staffordshire