Targets and league tables have reduced schools to little more than factories for producing good exam results, a government adviser will say today.

The effect of Labour delivering its education promises through test results, says Alan Smithers, is that pupils are disaffected, employers complain about a lack of “soft skills” and heads refuse to take up posts for fear they will be sacked.

Professor Smithers will tell a conference of the National Union of Teachers: “Unlike previous governments, it has taken upon itself responsibility for ‘delivery’ through targets and pressure from the centre. Schools have been reduced almost to factories for producing test and exam scores.”

The University of Buckingham academic will say that schools should give pupils a rounded education and unlike industry, that their test scores are “not the product of education in the way that cars, barrels of oil and tins of baked beans are for their industries”.

By running education like a big corporation, where the product is measured in test results, the Government has also put teachers off applying for the pressurised job of head. In seven years, the number of teachers taking early retirement, due to initiative overload and poor pupil behaviour, has doubled, to 10,270 in 2006.

In a study of school headship conducted by Professor Smithers, heads said there were enough candidates for the job, but that the lack of a sufficiently large salary and the extra workload put many primary school teachers off applying.

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