‘Sack the incompetent teachers.” It is 15 years now since newspaper headlines reported the fact that inspections by the Office for Standards in Education had identified 15,000 teachers who were not up to the job. I was chief inspector at the time. I knew that publicising this data would not endear me to the teacher unions. It did not. From then on I became a figure of hate. I still am in some quarters.

I can only say that if I were chief inspector today I would want to do even more to publicise the problem. Last week Ed Balls, the schools secretary, announced in a white paper that he was finally going to do something about this continuing national scandal. However, if you talk to any teacher in private they will tell you that the figure of 15,000, which was 4.8% of the teaching profession in the mid-1990s, is, if anything, an understatement now.

What is more, they will go on to say that despite Balls’s claims, nobody is prepared to tackle the problem. Most head teachers are extremely reluctant to confront teachers who cannot or will not cope. Politicians do not want to upset the unions. The General Teaching Council, which was set up to monitor professional standards, has dismissed just 10 teachers for incompetence since it took overall responsibility for sacking state-school teachers in June 2001.

Today, incompetent teachers continue to survive, moving up the salary scale while they damage the life chances of the children they fail each time they walk through the classroom door.

As an inspector I saw many brilliant lessons. I also observed teaching that I would not have wished any child of my own to have to endure. In one lesson I watched a boy fall asleep and slide quietly off his chair. Sitting at the back of the classroom, fighting to keep my own eyes open, I had every sympathy. There but for the grace of God, I thought, go I.

The lesson, which was on Ted Hughes’s poem Pike, should have been riveting. There was not, in fact, a spark of excitement. The teacher had read the poem in a spectacularly monotonous voice and then reduced it to something resembling a tedious crossword puzzle. At the point where the boy gave up the ghost the teacher was dictating notes he had dug out of a moth-eaten folder. He seemed to be bored stiff; everyone else in the classroom, including me, certainly was. I can still remember the joy I felt when the bell rang and our collective misery ended.

You, no doubt, have similar memories from your own days at school. You will certainly have been taught by teachers who, however hard they tried, simply could not keep control. This inability to impose discipline on the class is the most common, and dramatic, form of incompetence.

Inspectors are meant to sit passively observing what happens in the classroom. Sometimes, when discipline breaks down and low-level disruption and disobedience seem set to escalate into a major altercation between the pupils and the teacher, they have to take over. In my experience, the signs are obvious from the moment the children barge noisily into the classroom. Good teachers greet the next class at the door and usher them to their desks with smooth efficiency. Incompetent teachers preside over an immediate chaos. They will ask the children, quietly at first, to settle down. When nobody takes the slightest notice they will repeat the request, raising their voices until they are red in the face and bellowing.

Ten minutes into the lesson the disorder will of its own accord typically subside into relative quiet. The teacher seizes the opportunity and makes, perhaps, a little progress. Then somebody will take it into their head to crack a joke or knock somebody else’s bag onto the floor and the class is back to square one. The children who want to learn sit in patient despair, knowing that the whole fiasco is a waste of time.

Now Balls has announced that teachers will in future need a “licence” before they are allowed to teach and that they will be subjected to five-year “MoT” tests. Should we applaud? Has a government minister at last understood a fundamental problem that is blighting our children’s education? Sadly, the answer to both these questions is no. This latest policy announcement will change nothing.

The truth is that teachers must already be licensed before they can teach. They have to pass a teacher training qualification and have then to be judged competent in the classroom. The MoT test is apparently to be conducted by the very head teachers who should have been monitoring the performance of their staff over these past 15 years. Last week’s ministerial announcement was one more government gimmick, designed to grab a few headlines and persuade the electorate that public service reform is still high on the political agenda. Teachers who know that they are failing their children can continue to sleep easy in their beds. Good teachers can reflect on a new bureaucratic absurdity that is about to deflect them from the job they love.

There is nothing in last week’s policy announcements to applaud. On the one hand, we have old initiatives such as academies and specialist schools rehashed yet again; on the other there are new ideas that are simply batty. Having, for example, invested billions in the teaching of phonics and only last year insisted that phonics was the key to all progress, Balls now says that it is up to every teacher to do what they think best. He promises one-to-one tuition when he knows it cannot be afforded, and, incidentally, should not be needed if children had been taught to read properly in the first place. Oh, and all will be well, because parents can sue if they do not like the education their children are receiving.

It would be a joke if it were not for the fact that children’s lives are at stake.

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