IT ISN’T OFTEN I find myself cheering along to the beat of the teaching unions’ spring conferences. They tend to offer a familiar tune of teachers attacking the Government; some hapless minister or other arriving to make a speech “challenging” the teaching establishment; minister being booed or “listened to in angry silence”; departure of minister; conference over.

It never does the image of teachers much good, I reckon, stropping around in some conference hall whining about the Government. This year they seem to have changed the tune and have “pushy parents” in their sights. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) yesterday debated a series of motions calling for a degree of control over parents, from keeping so-called “Chelsea tractors” away from schools to asking politicians to stop using the term “parent power” and stopping parents recording conversations with teachers.

It is a bold move in a political climate that insists upon treating the parent, like the patient, as a consumer. New Labour seized upon the idea, more as a political tool than because it really believed in it. Tony Blair championed choice and individuals’ rights as a way of forcing reform through the public services against the wishes of the Labour Party. If you can say that “real people” want this, goes the argument, then it must be right, for the voters are always right.

The argument has its use but also its limits. For if you encourage people to believe that “I” am entitled to this service and that treatment, then “I” will demand this service and that treatment. And public services, collective provision of a service to everyone, cannot cope with the demands of each one as an individual — which is why bemused ministers find they receive small thanks from the public. If people expect that they can have everything they want from the school or their GP,they are going to be disappointed.

And so it comes to this: parents recording, covertly or overtly, teachers at parent-teacher meetings with the implicit threat that if Johnny’s education doesn’t turn out the way they expect it to, they will be heading to the courts. Parents with kids at state school are the troublesome ones. Private schools take the children, take the money and the parents broadly have to shut up for the next eight years. If they don’t like it, they can move school. Which is, of course, the key: parents of children in the state system do not have that choice, despite the overheated rhetoric of ministers.

Our local comprehensive, in rural West Sussex, has just been put into special measures. Its GCSE results have been bad for years. The Ofsted report failed the school as a whole (the sixth form is better) on almost every measure except for “personal development and wellbeing”. The leadership and management were judged ineffective in raising achievement, setting clear direction, monitoring and improving performance and achieving value for money.

“Leadership and management of the school are inadequate overall,” said the report. “Although the headteacher recognises much of what needs to be done, his leadership has not been sufficiently authoritative or decisive.” The headteacher, who has been in charge for four years, immediately announced that he is staying on to “get us out of this”.

Parents I have spoken to would rather he just got out, but what can they do? It is a rural area. There is no choice of schools. It’s also a Conservative area, without a lot of child poverty, so the Government isn’t terribly interested in it.

Meanwhile, two local primary schools sensibly trying to merge are facing acute criticism from parent- consumers who don’t like the idea of having to share facilities. Ministers have ramped up the rhetoric of choice and rights so high that parents disappointed with the absence of either in the real world are wielding tape recorders at PTA meetings instead, while not being able to see beyond the ends of their (or their children’s) noses when sensible reforms are proposed.

Or over the ends of their bonnets. The “Chelsea tractor” issue, another seized upon by the ATL yesterday, perfectly demonstrates the sort of me, me, me-ism that will wreck public services in the end. If you ask a parent why they have to drive these things, they answer, because everybody else does: I want my children to be safe from their cars, so I have to have a car as big and hard and heavy as theirs.

One primary school I know of is so worried about the safety of these things, which are so high that the driver cannot see a child out the back, and so heavy they can kill a child at 10mph, that it has banned parents from driving forwards into the car park at the end of the school day. Now they have to reverse in, while the children are still safely inside the school, so when they leave they are driving forwards. Australian research has shown that damage to children’s heads is 10 to 15 times worse when struck by a bull bar than by an ordinary car.

How can you be happy with your own child nested in your back seat while you are putting other kids at such risk? I don’t know why the campaign against SUVs stops at urban areas; few people driving them in the country need them either. We do have tarmac these days.

So, gold star to the ATL. Or perhaps just a silver. For Mary Bousted, its general secretary, said this week: “The Government says there are too many secondary schools which do not produce good enough outcomes for their pupils. I agree. But the explanation for this failure lies not in the low expectations of teachers or poor classroom practice, but in ghetto schools with unbalanced intakes serving a disaffected and disenfranchised underclass.”

Hmm. “The community served by the school is generally prosperous,” comments Ofsted of our local comprehensive, “although some students come from areas of rural deprivation. The proportion of students eligible for free school meals is low.”

God forbid that I should turn out to be a pushy parent after all, but if it’s nothing to do with the teachers or their “classroom practice”, Dr Bousted, then what do we do about it?

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