But what about the teachers? I feel like the child who had to point out that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes. What we got this week, from the Government's primary schools adviser, was a rehashed curriculum in fine new garb, and a rather verbose way of setting out what good teachers do already - but not a word about what really matters: the quality of the teachers.

Sir Jim Rose's report is a tragic missed opportunity. If this is the limit of ministers' ambition for primary schools then they might as well go home early, clutching those little prizes which schools award the slower pupils for “effort”. There certainly won't be any progress.

Sir Jim is in danger of giving bad and mediocre teachers even more jargon and curricular complexity to hide behind. The Independent Review of the Primary Curriculum is itself smothered in it. Sir Jim sums up his ideas: “The report explores a curriculum design based on a clear set of culturally derived aims and values, which promote challenging subject teaching alongside equally challenging cross-curricular studies.” You what?

This sort of jargon filters down through teachers to the classroom, with lessons wrapped in equally incomprehensible verbiage. “Are we doing reading now?” I asked one primary school teacher recently. “Oh no”, she replied, “this isn't reading - this is literacy.” Er...

There is something wrong with the teaching profession. Not all of it, but some of it - and presumably the part that curriculum reviews are intended to reach. The teachers have turned insular and defensive; even their language has become alien. It's as if they inhabit a different world.

So spelling isn't spelling any more (there is but one mention of “spelling” in Sir Jim's 73-page report): it has become “decoding” and “encoding”. Is it really necessary for an educational adviser to write out the following: “Children may know how to decode and encode print but must then apply that knowledge and skill to understanding the words on the page.” You mean, children should be taught to read, sir?

Good teachers - even barely competent teachers - do not need to be told that. Good teachers will already apply the best of the ideas in Sir Jim's report, while good schools will do some of what he recommends already, such as using specialised teachers in certain subjects. Good teachers do not hide behind jargon.

The problem is with the bad schools and the bad teachers, who rigorously apply the rules handed down by ministers and officials to groups of baffled children. Like the chilling Ofsted official who described Baby P as a collection of data last week, they can talk the strange talk, but they cannot walk the walk.

So children unable to write their alphabet sit in circles parroting the definitions of “phoneme” and “grapheme”: “sound” and “letter” to you and me. “It's in the curriculum,” shrugs a teacher. “Silly, isn't it?”

Incompetent teachers, or those lacking in confidence, and afraid of the authorities, stick rigidly to any script they are given, carefully ticking all the little boxes. And Sir Jim is about to hand them quite a script.

Take the idea of a “theme” uniting all the primary subjects. This could be done well, so that a Second World War theme for the term incorporates European geography as well as a spot of French, and the mathematics of how many planes in a squadron returned if seven were shot down - that sort of thing. But it could be done badly, like the early-years teacher I saw writing down “a” for “aeroplane” in a child's first reading lesson - “because the theme this term is travel”.

It's all very well trying to make the curriculum “relevant” but the fundamental purpose of education must be that the basic building blocks are taught well first. “Relevance” can crowd out education.

Take mathematics: Sir Jim issues a familiar warning that children are not being taught how to apply their mathematics skills to the real world. Teachers have heard this complaint many times before. So keen are they to listen that many have overcorrected, asking a child, for instance, how he would hand out 12 chocolate bars among four children, but not teaching him that 12 divided by 4 is 3.

“What is that?” a six-year-old asked me the other day, pointing to a minus sign. He knew how to “count back two from five” (although he couldn't read the words; they had to be read to him) but he was unable to decipher 5 - 2 = 3. A seven-year-old state school child taking a maths exam for private school entry asked his mother of the multiplication questions: “Why were there kisses all over the paper?”

There will be many teachers who insist this does not matter; that children are picking up the concepts or themes, or developing understanding, or some such. But it does matter. So hard are educationists trying to keep the attention of every child with “varied and matched learning”, to use some more jargon, that education has become frighteningly dumbed down.

Middle-class flight from state schools is directly attributable to this happy-clappy, thematic, lowest-common-denominator, “entire planned learning experience” approach. Some kids enjoy learning times tables.

Listen to this terrifying sentence in the Rose report: “The teacher who once said: ‘If children leave my school and can't paint, that's a pity but if they leave and can't read, that's a disaster' was perhaps exaggerating to make a point.” Exaggerating? It's appalling that the man reviewing the primary curriculum considers that an exaggeration.

Children are leaving primary schools unable to read and write and do basic sums - a fifth failed English this year, a fifth maths and almost four in ten failed in combined reading, writing and arithmetic - and they tip into the secondary system already five years behind their peers, too late for many ever to catch up. It is absolutely essential to get this right. Yet nowhere in Sir Jim's report (because it wasn't in his remit drawn up by the Schools Secretary Ed Balls) is there anything about improving the quality of teachers.

A McKinsey study last year, conducted by Tony Blair's former policy adviser Sir Michael Barber, examined school systems around the world to see what made the difference in the best. The absolutely key element, beyond new buildings and class sizes, the curriculum or the structure of the system, was the quality of teachers. Yet Britain is still stuck in a rule-bound, jobs-for-life education system that rewards laziness and mediocrity as highly as real talent and drive.

The gulf between the public and private sectors gets wider and wider. Sir Jim is in danger of pulling up the drawbridge.

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