Last Thursday millions of parents round the country must have wondered what on earth the National Union of Teachers (NUT) hoped to achieve. It is a question I have been asking myself for 40 years.

In one sense the answer is simple. The NUT and the other teacher unions exist to defend the indefensible. As a local authority officer I would sit listening as a union representative attempted to dig another of his members out of a hole. Teacher X was clearly incompetent, a laughing stock to his pupils, a drag on his colleagues who had to pick up the pieces after every lesson he had failed to teach. Should he be sacked? Oh no, the rep would inevitably splutter. This is a hard-working, conscientious teacher who has been failed by weak management.

As chief executive of the body responsible for implementing the national curriculum and its associated tests, I would sit listening to speeches denouncing the arrogance of a government which had dared, after painstaking consultation, to “dictate” the curriculum teachers had to teach. Teachers, the argument went, should as professionals be free to teach whatever they wanted and nobody else had any right to interfere.

The tests? They were denounced and still are denounced as an abomination. Children and teachers alike, we are told, suffer appalling stress from the fact that the results are published. Standards are fine, all is well in every school, there is no need for any kind of public accountability. If politicians and parents were simply to trust teachers, the promised educational land would be achieved overnight. Or so the tired old argument went.

So when as chief inspector I was attacked as a grand inquisitor figure whose job it was to demoralise and humiliate the teaching profession, I cannot say I was surprised. It was the same old general secretaries banging the same old drum, resistant to any reform, determined as ever to defend the indefensible.

They are still at it, of course. It is not just the NUT’s ridiculous anger at a pay settlement which is far better than that offered, for example, to the police. Worse in the long run is the tub-thumping defence of progressive, child-centred education which we hear at every union conference. Our children, one union official declared at a recent conference, must be taught how to walk in different ways for different purposes. I wondered, when I first heard this, whether it was April Fool’s Day. Sadly, it wasn’t.

What is it the teachers hope to achieve? They want the spotlight of accountability to be turned off; they want to retreat into a secret garden where progressive teaching methods can flourish; they want every teacher, however incompetent, to be paid more than any government can afford. Simultaneously, of course, they want to be respected as a serious profession. The fact that serious professionals do not strike seems to have eluded them.

Teachers should never strike. They are public servants whose job is more important than any other. They must recognise that they need the goodwill of the public and that irresponsible strikes will erode that goodwill.

It goes without saying that the government must stand its ground. Ministers should recognise that most teachers reject the bandstanding extremism of their union leaders and that many only belong to a union because they want insurance if something goes wrong in their career.

A sensible government would recognise this and make schools provide insurance cover for their teachers. Membership of the teaching unions would decline overnight and parents could stop worrying when next they are going to have to take a day off work to look after the kids.

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