Although spending in many areas of education in Britain is rising, its impact can be hard to discern in what is being served up in the nation's classrooms. Were education judged like a restaurant, we might well be querying the bill.

Fresh concerns arrive in a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Its portrait of the state of education in Britain is particularly disheartening where it addresses the education of the very young.

Even though spending per student in primary education is higher than the OECD average, Britain's achievements are measured and too often found wanting - a cruel slap for a government that puts so much store by setting targets, and monitoring those who fail to meet them.

Primary class sizes in the UK remain among the largest: among the 30-strong OECD, only Japan, South Korea and Turkey have bigger classes. The UK also stands out as the OECD country with the greatest disparity in class sizes between state and fee-paying schools. While this gulf may have consequences, the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University will tell the Government today that it is not the job of universities to re-engineer society, only to accept the brightest applicants.

But the OECD's findings may prove most chilling to those who already believe that children in Britain start formal learning far too young; spend too long at school; are given too many goals to attain; and are tested more than is healthy or productive, as if constantly weighing a pig fattens it.

Nine out of ten children aged 3 and 4 in Britain are enrolled in pre-primary programmes. In other OECD countries, the figure is seven out of ten. Among seven to eight-year-olds, pupils spend almost 100 more hours a year in class. Yet these investments in school hours and cash do not seem to pay long-term dividends: around 70 per cent of 15 to 19-year-olds in Britain stay at school. The OECD average is 81.5 per cent.

The arrival of this report may be as useful a moment as any to reconsider whether the Government has been wise to steamroller through the Early Years Foundation Stage, which prescribes dozens of reading and writing goals and scores of “developmental milestones” that pre-school toddlers must meet. The EYFS became law this month in the teeth of opposition from critics who say that, while it may be well intentioned, it is the wrong road to the right destination; that hot- housing toddlers does not just fail to deliver educational progress, it may positively corrode it.

Child-development experts find that children taught to read at 4 often do worse at school later. They urge allowing children to develop through play and practical experience until they are ready for more formal learning at around the age of 6 or 7: children in France, Germany and the US start learning to read and write at 6. In Finland and Sweden, it is 7.

And as they proceed through primary education, these children in Britain - according to a review being co-ordinated by Cambridge University - are tested more than in every other country that the researchers have studied; and with damaging consequences for the pupils' education.

Only a cynic such as Oscar Wilde says “nothing that is worth knowing can be taught”. But the OECD's report card offers the Government an opportunity to rethink the EYFS before it is itself tested, only to be asked to stay behind after class.