When Labour won the 1997 election the prime minister, much to my amazement, decided both to keep me in the post of chief inspector of schools and to continue the rigorous approach to testing and school inspection the Conservatives had introduced in the late 1980s. That approach was beginning to deliver, and I was happy to stay.

By autumn 2000 when I decided I could no longer continue in the post it had become clear that any commitment to rigour was fast declining.

Last week it disappeared completely. The secretary of state for education, Alan Johnson, announced that the government is set to abolish the national curriculum tests children currently take at 7, 11 and 14. Instead, they are to be assessed when they are “ready”, and, if the school does not like the result, then the child can be tested again until, presumably, the desired score is achieved.

This decision is the final nail in the coffin of school accountability. Nobody will know quite how the tests have been administered, and it will be impossible to compare one school to another. At secondary school level “personalised learning” will lead to students taking GCSE and A-level exams at different times. So here, too, comparisons become difficult.

Johnson, of course, pretends otherwise. League tables, he blusters, will still exist. Parents will still be in a position to make an informed choice about the school they wish their child to attend. It is nonsense, of course.

The truth is that ministers will no longer have to face the annual humiliation of admitting that they have failed once again to hit their self-imposed targets for improvements in literacy and numeracy. They will no longer have to try to persuade us, as Jim Knight did last week, that the appalling fact that only 45.3% of 16-year-olds achieve five good GCSE grades including English and maths is actually good news.

What a U-turn. At the beginning Labour made it clear that mastering the basics — being able to read, write and do sums — meant more than anything else. But last week’s revamped government league tables based on five good GCSEs tell a different story. It’s disgraceful that after 10 years fewer than half of 16-year-olds are reaching basic standards in English and maths.

At some schools the difference made by including English and maths in the GCSE tally is stark. At Madeley court comprehensive in Telford, for instance, just 16% of pupils got five good GCSEs including English and maths last year. Before the basic subjects were included in the scoring, the figure was 82% (boosted by entering pupils for a controversial GNVQ in information technology, which counts as a ridiculous four GCSEs).

Parents are expected to make sense of this kind of swing in fortune. They are meant to ponder new “value added” league tables which purport to register how successful schools are in teaching children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds or ethnic minority families. No grammar school appears in the top 100 schools in this league table, and schools which languished at the bottom of the conventional table now shoot miraculously to the top.

Confused? So am I, but don’t worry. We are meant to believe a new educational dawn is about to break. Free from the burden of external scrutiny our teachers will focus on the needs of each of the 30 children in their class. They will adapt the boring constraints of the national curriculum to the interests of each child. Learning is to be “personalised”. Creativity and innovation will flourish.

In some schools, perhaps; in most, I suspect not. The truth is that the government has given up. It has abandoned the reforms which, in time, would have improved education.

Schools, like children, need challenge. Transparency matters. How, after all, are problems in failing schools going to be solved if we do not know which schools are failing? Who really thinks that real teachers in real classrooms can or should respond to the individual needs of each of their pupils? The truth, of course, is that learning cannot be “personalised”. Learning French grammar is learning French grammar. Full stop. Good teachers will help individual pupils overcome their individual problems as they always have, but beyond this platitude the concept of “personalisation” has no meaning.

The rot began with David Blunkett, who, for all his tough public talk, was never comfortable with “naming and shaming” failing schools and who oversaw a review of the national curriculum that emphasised the teaching of “learning skills” over the mastery of factual knowledge.

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