To begin with, I couldn’t work out why there was yet another swathe of revisions to the Sats requirements, and consequently the curriculum, for KS2. 

Was it, I wondered, because of industry bosses thumping the boardroom table and demanding to know why no school leavers these days could identify sentences using the passive voice, or tell the difference between a preposition phrase and a relative clause? It seemed unlikely. Was it the parents, then, angrily hiding the smartphones and demanding that their 11-year-olds should be able to subtract a quarter from one and one fifth, using only a pencil and squared paper? I doubted it.

Then it dawned on me. This round of changes wasn’t the result of outside pressures. It wasn’t even the clueless meddling of some whey-faced product of the public school system flailing around to remember what was good enough for him when he was a boy. It was clever - and far more sinister.

Our education system is fear-based.

The last thing our leaders want is to rear a generation of articulate, free-thinking, creative young people who will question the status quo and propose alternatives. Hence the national curriculum is being intentionally crammed with junk knowledge - teaching 11-year-olds to multiply fractions without a calculator or to recognise subordinating conjunctions and modal verbs.

Educationally, it’s pointless - the equivalent of making prisoners dig holes and fill them in again. Tactically though, it’s brilliant. Teachers are kept under such pressure, they have no time to educate creatively or even to stop and question what they are being told to do. Children are kept under such pressure that they have no time to question, to wonder or - most dangerous of all - to imagine.

Pupil and educator alike are subjected to ruthless testing and unachievable standards. Should they succeed, more impossible demands will be heaped upon them. Thus, they can be subjugated, their spirit broken by repeated failure and the public convinced that teachers are a rather lazy, hopeless bunch, worthy of little respect.  

To quote Aung San Suu Kyi, “It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”

Do I detect a hint of desperation in their methods, though?

Jan Stone is an educator in Somerset

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