‘This,” I thought to myself recently, “must have been what Frankenstein felt.” I was listening to the feedback from an inspector who had just spent a few days in a school owned by Cognita, the education company I chair. He had been pretty positive about most aspects of the school’s performance, but then announced that “there was too much didactic teaching”.

My ears pricked up. My blood pressure soared. I rather approve of didactic teaching. I tend to think that teachers should tell children things that dispel ignorance. What is known as “active learning”, children discovering things for themselves, does not seem to be the most sensible approach to education.

If he had told me that he had found poor didactic teaching, I would have listened. If he had quoted convincing evidence, I would have acted upon it. I was not prepared to sit quietly and be told that the kind of education our parents want for their children is wrong.

Inspectors should not drag their ideological ball and chain into the classrooms they visit. They should not use inspections as a vehicle to impose fashionable educational ideas. In my days as chief inspector of schools, it was the cardinal sin. Too often now it seems to be the norm.

Fee-paying schools function within an education market. They provide a service which parents and potential parents value, or they die. Parents read the brochures and study the exam results. They do not need the information contained in an inspection report and the school does not need to be inspected to be accountable to its customers.

So why are fee-paying schools inspected? Why does the state, which has no financial interest in their work and no legitimate reason to meddle, force them to submit to a process which most head teachers believe is at best a complete waste of time and money, and, at worst, humiliating and harmful?

Because state schools are inspected and fee-paying schools must, therefore, be inspected too. Because the government does not trust parents to research the options and come to their own unaided decision. Because the majority of its backbenchers hate private education and love regulation, particularly when it wastes time and money.

The really interesting question is why the private sector tolerates such nonsense. What would the government do if Eton, Harrow, Winchester and a dozen other top independent schools announced that they were not going to play ball any more?

Would the secretary of state for education, Alan Johnson, stamp his foot and close these world famous institutions? Can you imagine the reaction to an act of such educational vandalism? Of course he would not. It is inconceivable. And, once the precedent had been set every other independent school could get on with its own independent business.

Will it happen? Of course it won’t. Head teachers mutter irritably behind closed doors, but few have the courage to speak out. The feeling seems to be that it is better to lie low, particularly given the prospect of the great beast Gordon. Many are only too happy to dance to the latest ministerial tune, partnering the local failing state school, sharing their resources, wasting the money that parents have given them to educate pupils. Sooner or later those parents are going to cotton on and object and we’ll see a reassertion of independence. In the interim the inspector will continue to call.

State schools consume billions of pounds of public money and should be inspected. But only if the inspection tells the school something it does not know and informs parents. The current system of “10-minute” inspections based on the school’s evaluation of its own performance fulfils neither criteria. Ministers have, therefore, a choice. The Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) could return to a serious objective scrutiny of every aspect of a school’s performance. Alternatively, it could and should be scrapped.

I never thought that I would be saying this. I spent six years of my life defending Ofsted against the criticisms of the teacher unions. Now, God help me, I am standing shoulder to shoulder with the National Union of Teachers. In fact, the NUT has won. It has persuaded ministers to accept its view of school accountability, and, in so doing, has destroyed any prospect of schools being held to account. I can only congratulate my old adversaries. The creature that is now inspection is not what I intended. It is part now of the problem, another cog in the bureaucratic machine, another waste of public money.