A tram timetable has been included in an A-level English syllabus in a misguided attempt to make learning seem relevant to young people, a leading educator has claimed.

Bernice McCabe, co-director of the Prince’s Teaching Institute (PTI), the Prince of Wales’s education charity, said that such an emphasis on “functional learning” risks dumbing down standards and squeezing out in-depth subject knowledge.

Mrs McCabe said that many teachers felt thwarted by a pervasive philosophy that the purpose of education was to teach skills that “enhance the competitiveness of the nation” instead of in-depth knowledge.

“It is indicative that the specifications for an AS paper in English Language and Literature should include a railway timetable, and that a chief examiner should be seriously discussing the merits of putting a bus pass in the same anthology,” she said.

Speaking at a course run by the institute for secondary school English and history teachers, Mrs McCabe said that this approach was evident in the attitude of the curriculum regulator, the QCA. “The aim, they state, is to create ‘successful learners, confident individuals and responsible citizens’. But they say nothing at all about what children should be learning,” she said.

By far the most serious consequence of this emphasis on skills and an idea that learning should be “fun” was that it may lead to the “cultural and intellectual impoverishment of a generation of school children”, she said. It would be far better, she suggested, to allow teachers with enthusiasm in their subject to teach it in depth.

The timetable referred to by Mrs McCabe is the Booking Conditions section for Manchester’s Metrolink tram. It is included in an anthology of texts in syllabus for English language and literature of the exam board, AQA.

The board defended its inclusion, saying that it was one of 30 texts in the anthology. A spokesman said: “The tram guide is just one of the nonliterary texts and among the literary texts are pieces by Samuel Johnson, Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain and Charles Dickens,” he said.

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