And suddenly we discovered that everyone was — and always had been — antsy, uncomfortable, sometimes downright worried about government national literacy and numeracy strategies and all the other educational bossinesses likely to be scrapped later today.

“A totemic break from the Blair years,” predicted one mildly Gordonian source, referring presumably to the years when GB and all his ministers were cowed by the ruthless Tony. A death-bed rejection of Gordon Brown’s own statism, said sundry Tories and centre-right commentators, who — one might have assumed — had spent the better part of a decade and a half in impotent complaint about the burden of prescription being doled out to England’s teachers.

So now the moment comes to “end the centralised control of schools” and we cannot find anyone — other, presumably, than the mute Mr Blair — who was ever in favour of it. It was obvious, wasn’t it, right from the beginning, that the “target culture” was going to be a catastrophe? Fancy telling teachers what to teach! What mad Stalinist dreamt that one up? Or, as Francis Gilbert, the teacher obviously formed in the Robin Williams desk-jumping mould, argued on these pages yesterday: “If only the Government had realised in 1997 what it realises now: it’s best to leave teachers to teach. Think of all the money and time that could have been saved. And think of all the school-leavers who would have had some basic skills.”

But why imagine, when we only have to recall? I seem to remember actually living and studying through the late golden era when there were no literacy strategies, no SATs, no league tables, no Ofsteds, when teachers had autonomy to do their thing, and conjugating French verbs was a pleasure, trigonometry just slipped into your eager mind, and working-class kids sat enchanted at story-time before rushing out to sample Paradise Lost for themselves. The days when an English (or Welsh) school education was accounted one of the best in the world. Days that didn’t exist.

Party-pooper though I am, I apologise for spoiling the party with some inconvenient history. Starting in October 1976 when Jim Callaghan told the country that the content of our education system south of Berwick was failing our children. Callaghan’s speech caused a sensation precisely because, up till that moment, curriculum was a matter for the professionals, yet here he was talking about a national “core curriculum” and the need for “basic knowledge”. But surely teachers in 1976 knew what they were about? Hmm, said the PM, there was “unease” felt by parents “about the new informal methods of teaching”.

Callaghan’s problem was not with the gifted children such as those incredibles depicted so winningly in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, but with the way the average and below-average child was falling farther and farther behind children in countries such as Germany. In the end, however, Callaghan was too beset by crises to do much about it.

The true Callaghanite reformer (and centraliser) was to arrive a decade later in the shape of Kenneth Baker. In 1988 the Great Education Reform Bill (or Gerbil, as it was known) introduced the national curriculum, testing at 7, 11, and 14, published results and the key stages. It was done precisely because the system was failing; yes, even in the do-your-own-thing days of autonomy and professional judgment.

In fact in 1992 the “three wise men” appointed by John Major concluded that there was still too much failure because “highly questionable dogmas have led to excessively complex classroom practices and have devalued the place of subjects in the curriculum”. They were talking about bad teaching and worse teacher training. By the time that wicked Mr Blair came to power, battle was fully joined. In 1996 43 per cent of English schoolchildren failed to achieve the expected standard for English: 43 per cent! Do people really understand what that means for a country, or for the failing individuals? Hence the full adoption of the literacy strategy which, by 2005, had brought the figure down to 21 per cent — less than half of what it was, but still one fifth of schoolchildren.

Times change. What might be a necessary strategy in a time of abject failure can itself become a problem as you look to move on. Teacher training is far better than it was, the teaching force has, according to many impartial people, been “reprofessionalised” and the genie of parental expectation cannot be forced back into the bottle.

But it is indeed frustrating for good professionals to be second-guessed by a distant ministry or quango. As a professional jealous of my own autonomy, I can understand that, and I can see that we need to try it the other way.

But it isn’t magic. It isn’t risk-free. In the days of sylvan glades and spellbound story-listening, all was far from well. I had one or two inspiring teachers as a child and adolescent, some very competent ones and plenty of useless ones. Now I think about it, the great characteristic of those days was favouritism towards the bright, so the useless teachers were even more useless for the “less academic” children, some of whom left primary school in pretty much the same condition as they entered it, except having made some great balsa-wood models.

Professional autonomy can quite easily turn into professional complacency, and if it does, then those affected are unlikely to be the children of middle-class parents who will always find a way of making the system work for them. There are signs that the abolition of Key Stage 1 tests in 2005 has led to some falling off in results, and if (as I expect) Key Stage 2 tests are also abolished by an incoming Tory government, the same might well happen with 11-year-olds. Just not the 11-year-olds of journalists or Conservative politicians.

So what will matter even more than it does today is accountability. Fewer tests, less intrusive inspection, less prescription, must be accompanied with much greater openness on the part of the teaching profession; with a far greater willingness to share information and power with others. We simply cannot afford to slip back to the golden days.

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