Primary schools are more like boot camps than a place for learning for 10 and 11-year-olds, who are drilled to take national tests to the point of exhaustion, a union leader says today.

Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, is to tell the union’s annual conference in Bournemouth that the system of national testing and school league tables is failing a generation.

Hundreds of thousands of Year 6 children are spending hours every day preparing for their national Key Stage 2, or Sats, tests, in English, maths and science next month.

“This is not education, this is training — and the consequences are catastrophic,” she says. “They lead to a period of exhaustion, not only for the teacher, but also for the pupils who are route-marched through to Level 4.

“We know that real learning does not take place in boot camp Year 6 classes.”

Dr Bousted will also use her speech to call for Ofsted, the schools watchdog, to be stripped of its powers of inspection so that the job of monitoring school performance can be handed to independent advisers working for the local authority.

She believes that Ofsted’s main aim — to improve school standards — has been a complete failure, but accepts that Ofsted is now the most influential force in English schools.

“The driving force behind what happens in schools in England today is not the Government, it is Ofsted.

“Ministers’ words are wasted unless what they want is included in the Ofsted inspection framework. The Ofsted inspection process drives the education system at every level,” she says.

Despite this, Ofsted is failing to improve school results. National tests show, for example, that between the ages of 11 (the last year of primary school) and 12 (the first year of secondary school) more than a quarter of pupils make no apparent progress at all.

Dr Bousted will praise Tony Blair’s investment in education, but criticise him for a “pick-and-mix” approach that has created an array of new types of schools that do nothing towards giving poorer families more choice.

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