'Free state schools from excessive testing' call

Civitas said that instead, state schools needed to be freed from excessive testing, an overly-bureaucratic regime of inspection and excessively prescriptive study programmes in order to improve the primary curriculum.

Professor David Conway said education ought to prepare children for life in a free and democratic society, rather than act as training for work.

In its report, Liberal Education and the National Curriculum, Civitas said attempts to “weaken the academic basis of the curriculum” will lead to a widening gap between children educated in independent or grammar schools and the rest.

“These children will be unable to access the world of high culture, which could transform their lives, because teachers have decided that they should not be challenged by anything beyond the scope of their immediate experience,” the group said.

Prof Conway wrote: “By inviting each child to enter an imagined world which exceeds and leads beyond his or her pre-existing experience, a liberal education offers a liberation from the parochialism, materialism and estrangement of the modern world.”

He said it would also allow “a child to experience life through the eyes of other cultures, epochs and world views”.

The 1988 Education Reform Act imposed a “legislative straitjacket” on state schools and “denied their teachers and pupils alike scope for spontaneity and creativity”.

He added: “State schools only need freeing from excessive testing, an overly bureaucratised regime of inspection, and excessively prescriptive programmes of study, to be able once again to make provision of liberal education their central purpose”.