They tried, they really did. The Tories might have introduced testing into schools but it was Labour who bought up the world's supply of red pens. Tony Blair said “Education, Education, Education” and within ten years, England was top of the league tables for testing. Even North Korea couldn't beat us.

Children in England are now expected to take 70 formal tests by the age of 16, but that's just the pointiest peak of a mountain of educational bossiness, where the Department of Kidulthood inundates schools with instructions on what pupils should learn and how it should be taught.

The Government publishes a 130-page booklet telling nursery teachers exactly how a toddler should perform. One demand is that “practitioners play alongside children, using words and actions to represent objects, saying, "Mm I'd like some more cake', while pretending to cut a slice and pass it”.

But if you think the “toddler targets” are obsessive, it gets worse. Our four-year-old must be assessed on everything from personal hygiene to knowing what a phonome is. By 7, my eldest son was expected to meet a series of “attainment targets” in 14 areas, from religious studies to citizenship as well as sitting his Sats. These range from “creating and performing dances using simple movement patterns, including those from different times and cultures”, to realising “that family and friends should care for each other”, to being able to “record calculations, using the symbols +, -, x , ÷ and = correctly”. In Germany, France and America children have only just started school.

By Key Stage Four, at the age of 14 to 16, the curriculum resembles a giant boa constrictor wrapped around schools, squeezing the life out of them. Pupils must do everything from considering “a range of scenarios (from local to global) where there are inequalities and explain how different kinds of rights need to be protected”, to evaluating “in depth the importance of religious diversity in a pluralistic society”, while understanding about using “congruence and mathematical similarity”.

Employers and universities complain that 40 per cent of these children still don't have a proper grasp of reading and writing, but the Government is thrilled by its charts and league tables. Never mind that it doesn't have an education policy, the tests show that it is busy doing something.

The only problem is the results. The more national tests British children sit, the farther down the OECD international rankings they sink. By last year, it wasn't only Russia that had overtaken Britain in the literacy league tables but Latvia and Estonia. Britain is now 13th in literacy, down from third place in the 1980s when children were never tested - and this is despite doubling the education budget.

The Education Secretary Ed Balls has blamed falling standards on PlayStations, faith schools, lazy governors and even overweight children. But never on the testing which, he said, was producing “excellent results”.

Now he is getting rid of the Sats for 14-year-olds. But not for the right reasons. He has scrapped them because their marking became a fiasco, whole batches of results are still missing from last summer and the American company responsible, ETS, has been sacked. It's easier to get rid of the tests than find someone to mark them properly.

But he is at last on the right track. All Sats - at 7, 11 and 14 - should be scrapped, not because children find them too stressful, not because they are a waste of time, though they are, but because they are actually children's education.

Teachers are forced to drill pupils every day to pass tests in maths, English and science to the exclusion of all other subjects. Some, according to the General Teaching Council, come under such pressure that they fiddle results or help the children to cheat.

Nine out of ten Year 7 teachers, according to a survey by Civitas, thought Sats exaggerated a child's abilities and masked their failures. Teachers inevitably focus attention on the borderline cases who can swing the results, rather than the brightest or the struggling.

In Wales, where performance is improving faster than in England, they have abandoned Sats. Instead teachers can use a bank of tests for their own assessments. Countries at the top of the literacy tables, such as Sweden and Finland, use “formative assessment” with informal testing throughout the year.

Since testing was introduced, a million teenagers still fail to gain even the lowest grade in five GCSEs; 23,000 pupils have passed no GCSEs at all.

And they don't help schools. Failing establishments are overwhelmed by targets and examinations, good schools find them a distraction. Unannounced Ofsted inspections and word-of-mouth stories are far better at helping parents to choose the right school than a league table that massages the results.

It's the heads and teachers who raise standards, not Sats. Yet each head is weighed down by 3,384 pages of instructions from the Government every year, with two thirds relating to curriculum and testing. Scrapping Sats could save more than the £156 million spent on marking alone, with the money going to recruit high-calibre staff.

Pupils need passionate teachers free to have time to pass on their excitement and enthusiasm. This is not about expecting children to go back to hugging trees rather than learning how to spell “tree”, it's about giving teachers the time to work out the capabilities of their pupils themselves, rather than ticking a box. The best teachers continually assess their pupils and monitor their progress.

When I was at school, we sang: “No more homework, no more tests, no more sitting at the old school desk.” It turns out that, at least in part, we had a better vision of the future of education than Mr Balls and his tractor-production statistics.

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