Tory MP says number of old Etonians in government is due to other schools not having same 'commitment to public service'

An attempt by one of David Cameron's policy advisers to defend the number of old Etonians in government backfired when he was lampooned by headteachers for claiming that Eton was better than other schools at promoting a "commitment to public service".

Jesse Norman, the Tory MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire, himself an old Etonian, suggested on Saturday that its pupils received the best grooming for office because of the values the school instils in them. "Other schools don't have the same commitment to public service. They do other things," said Norman, who was one of two old Etonians to be promoted to top policy roles by Cameron last week.

He added: "It's one of the few schools where the pupils really do run vast chunks of the school themselves. So they don't defer in quite the same way; they do think there's the possibility of making change through their own actions."

The remarks met with incredulity among heads in the state sector. Joan McVittie, headteacher of Woodside High School in Haringey, north London, who was made a dame in the last New Year honours list, said: "I have never heard such nonsense in all my life.

"I think the gentleman should go into a state school and see what work young people there do on school councils, the voluntary work they are involved in and what they do in the community. He seems to think that all we poor people do in our state schools is sit and work for our exams and that we have no time to do good in the community. He is talking complete and utter rubbish."

Mike Griffiths, headteacher of Northampton School for Boys, and currently president of the Association of School and College Leaders, said he found the comments "slightly ridiculous" and "rather tiresome". "I am not sure his views really correspond with reality when you think them through," he said. "I have not heard of many old Etonians becoming social workers because they are so wedded to the idea of public service, have you?

"Is he saying that things like fagging and bullying that went on at Eton are good for developing leadership?"

From the private sector, Anthony Seldon, the master of Wellington College, said: "Eton, in fact, is not the only school that teaches public service and character. It is something that can and should be taught in all schools, state and private."

Seldon said the government that Norman was speaking for was placing too much emphasis on exams and too little on values such as public service and the building of character. "Success in life is about so much more than exam results," he said.

Norman praised the way Eton focused on old-fashioned subjects. "Things like rhetoric and poetry and public speaking and performance are incredibly important to young people succeeding in life," he said.

The other Old Etonian promoted last week by Cameron was Jo Johnson, brother of the mayor of London, Boris Johnson. Jo was made head of the No 10 policy unit .

Norman added: "I didn't know any of the people at the top of government when I was at school. I did know Boris. He was a couple of years below me. But then everyone knew Boris. He was a rather distinctive figure. Jo is much younger. I knew Cameron's brother slightly, but he wasn't in my year."

• Private schools
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• Secondary schools

Toby Helm
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Research shows burglary, vandalism and car theft down in places with influx from eastern Europe

Crime in neighbourhoods that have experienced mass immigration from eastern Europe over the past 10 years has fallen significantly, according to research that challenges a widely held view over the impact of foreigners in the UK.

Rates of burglary, vandalism and car theft all dropped following the arrival of migrants from Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and seven other countries after they joined the European Union in 2004. But the opposite was found to be the case in areas that experienced an influx of asylum seekers from the late 1990s onwards, where rates of property crime were "significantly higher". In addition, immigration has no impact on levels of violent crime on British streets, according to the analysis.

Experts from the London School of Economics set out to examine if the common assertion that immigrants cause crime was corroborated by statistics, after noting a "paucity of credible empirical evidence" to support the claim.

Places that had attracted large numbers of eastern European immigrants enjoyed a "significant fall in property crime", a category of offence that also includes theft and shoplifting. The report, to be published later this year in Harvard University's Review of Economics and Statistics, also found that the relationship between the arrival of thousands of foreigners and levels of violence was "close to zero and insignificant".

Brian Bell, a research fellow at the London School of Economics, said: "The view that foreigners commit more crime is not true. The truth is that immigrants are just like natives: if they have a good job and a good income they don't commit crime."

The findings come days after a report revealed that the UK is becoming more peaceful with rates of violent crime and murder falling more rapidly in the past decade than in any other western European country. The UK Peace Index, produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace, found that violent crime rate fell by a quarter between 2003 and 2012, a period of relatively high immigration.

The Conservatives have pledged to reduce net migration – the difference between the number leaving the country permanently every year and those arriving – from 200,000 during the last government to less than 100,000. Tory elements have sounded warnings over the impending arrival of more Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants, who at the end of 2013 will gain the same rights to work in the UK as other EU citizens, with Romania's prime minister admitting last week that citizens of his country had come to Britain and committed crimes. However, the LSE report found that neighbourhoods that have a high level of immigrants have a lower number of offences in some crime categories than comparative areas with fewer foreigners.

Marian Fitzgerald, a visiting professor of criminology at the University of Kent, said that the night-time economy, and the numbers of people who could afford to drink alcohol and socialise, was a key driver of violence.

"Most violent crime is associated with affluence. Most immigrants are not affluent so it's not surprising that immigration has no impact on that large proportion of total violence which is a function of affluence."

David Wilson, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Birmingham City University agreed that recession tended to reduce crime because less people could afford to go out and drink. However, he also said broader factors such as increased access to information had made people acutely sensitised to violence.

"Globalisation through the internet, through media images has meant that there is a greater intolerance to violence. There is more of a global acceptance that inter-personal violent crime is something that we should not be engaged in."

Wilson added a third factor also came into play, saying that the type of immigrant attracted to Britain tended to contradict the scrounger stereoptype.

"Historically, people who move from one nation state to another are the kinds of people who are more entrepreneurial. Far from coming to live off benefits, the people who tend to want to move are the ones who want to get a job and get ahead," he added.

Previous research by the LSE team revealed that enclaves with high numbers of immigrants experienced less crime than neighbourhoods with fewer arrivals from abroad. The research focused on neighbourhoods that had an immigrant population larger than 30%. Bell and his team found "strong and consistent evidence that enclaves have lower crime experiences than otherwise observably similar neighbourhoods that have a lower immigrant share of the population".

Further research was required to understand the beneficial enclave effect of crime and in turn help enhance political debate on immigration, the report concluded.

One area where large numbers of immigrants exerted a negative effect was highlighted. In places where the government located large numbers of asylum seekers from the late 90s, property crime rates were "significantly higher".

A proportion of the crime might be explained as a result of crimes committed against immigrants, the report's authors added. Improving work opportunities for asylum seekers might have a beneficial effect on reducing crime, Bell said, but admitted such a move would be politically unpalatable and could send a message to potential migrants that asylum applications were a way of seeking work.

• Immigration and asylum
• Crime
• London School of Economics and Political Science

Mark Townsend
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The Durand school in Sussex is an experiment that will be about as accessible as Hogwarts to most pupils

With his surname out of a Billy Bunter story and views on race dating even further back in British history, Mr John Cherry, Chichester and West Sussex Conservative councillor, has not been an easy character to believe in. Not that one doubts, for a second, the veracity of the Mail on Sunday but, even at their most unreconstructed, the lads at Greyfriars school never accused the Indian prince Hurree Jamset Ram Singh of having urges that would inevitably propel him into the "forest", wherein he would ignite a "sexual volcano".

Mr Cherry's views would be arresting at any time; they came to national prominence as residents of Stedham, West Sussex, mustered against a scheme by the Durand Academy to build a weekly state boarding school at a disused school one mile from their homes. Although the National Trust has also expressed doubts about its environmental impact, it was Mr Cherry's assertions on the unsuitability of non-white pupils for an education in his area of outstanding natural beauty that made the headlines.

For the Conservatives, as the Labour education spokesman, Stephen Twigg, gratefully reminded us, Mr Cherry is not a good look: "It's no surprise people still think of the Conservatives as the nasty party." Taking the longer view, however, perhaps Mr Twigg can see that the embarrassment of the racist, but now excluded and serially condemned Cherry, has doubled as an opportunity for Michael Gove to portray the Durand boarding school scheme as visionary, magnificently enlightened, a superb use of more than £17m of state funds. How, having heard his objections, is it possible for a decent person to be on the same side on this issue as the ghastly Cherry? Academy-sceptics who might have wondered, were Durand being assessed on its own, dubious merits, if there weren't better ways to serve Stockwell's teenaged pupils, must now be more likely to see the point of a bizarre one-off, which is going in news reports by the cringeing oxymoron, "the state Eton". The Department of Education called it "a bold experiment and a chance to give inner-city pupils a truly world-class education", adding: "It is difficult to believe that anyone would want to obstruct such an inspirational project." Well, it's just got a lot more difficult, certainly, thanks to Mr Cherry.

In fact, if Mr Cherry were not a real person, it would be tempting to think that he had been entirely designed on a computer at Durand's PR agency, Political Lobbying & Media Relations. In 2011, PLMR won two Gold Lion prizes at Cannes for its campaign to get DoE money for the boarding school. "Over £2m worth of print and broadcast coverage," swanks a triumphal video. "Public relations and political relations brought Durand's case to millions and helped make their dream a reality."

And now let's hear it for West Sussex racism, without which the case against building Durand academy, in and around the site of the abandoned St Cuthman's school, might have focused, drearily, on its disputed costs. Opponents of the scheme, who have consulted Melvyn Roffe, headmaster of a state boarding school in Norfolk, argue that the school's financial estimates are unrealistically low or to quote Roffe, talking to the Independent, "ludicrous". Margaret Hodge, chair of the public accounts committee, has asked the National Audit Office to investigate the DoE's "investment decision" and the basis upon which the £17m grant was made.

But if Durand can, eventually, be defended against environmental and financial objections, it will still, as the DoE admits, be "an experiment", and a deeply eccentric one at that. After the PR campaign, it remains unclear what educational benefits are to be enjoyed by the inner London children and families thereby invited to redress the decline of minor, Rattigan-style public schools that, not being Eton, never conferred on their inmates the latter's celebrated confidence and guaranteed places in a Cameron-led cabinet. In fact, if he is not to be deflected, Durand's director of education, Greg Martin, who dreams of leading "the Eton of the state sector", is advised never to watch The Browning Version or read a wrenching article by the Malvern College alumnus and journalist James Delingpole: "I honestly didn't realise I'd been to a 'minor' public school until my first term at Christ Church."

Frank Field has strongly endorsed the Durand scheme, citing an established underclass, and the evidence of his own report, "that the life chances of most children are determined before they step into school". But the Durand boarders, by no means all of them from exceptionally deprived or chaotic homes, will start aged 13, the advantage of this late arrival being, presumably, reduced psychic damage. "Of one thing [however] I do feel fairly sure," Orwell wrote, in his essay "Such, Such Were the Joys", "and that is that boarding schools are worse than day schools. A child has a better chance with the sanctuary of its home near at hand."

Although Durand pupils will, of course, be infinitely better taught, housed and treated than the young Orwell, not much geography separates the proposed boarding school, in the disused St Cuthman's, from the writer's South Downs prep. "I even conceived a prejudice against Sussex," Orwell wrote, "as the county that contained St Cyprian's." But Orwell's health did not allow him to enjoy opportunities that will make Durand a mens sana paradise for more muscular teens. "They will be taught in 25 acres of open countryside," Mr Martin says. "There's a swimming pool, they will go back to playing real cricket, tennis – all in the fantastic open air".

Professional circumstances have, alas, prevented him from testing his theories in the state system, but the master of Wellington College, Anthony Seldon, says we should all get behind Durand's escapism. "The natural rhythm of the year," he explains, "is far more beneficial to the rounded growth of balanced young people than a concrete, urban, artificial, neon-lit life."

Parents tempted by the pre-industrial lifestyle will be aware that, for most pupils, Durand will be about as accessible as Hogwarts. Even supposing concrete-free education were to move from being a counsel of pedagogic despair to a proven means of improving life chances, it would be impossible to distribute it fairly. Aren't there more effective uses of £17m, simpler ways of getting children outside? Defending exceptionalism, Goveites always ask, why attack good schools? But to promulgate, via Durand, the idea that outdoorsy boarding academies can provide something "inspirational" for the state's inner city pupils is, implicitly, to do just that. Recent research shows that children in London's poorest areas, far from requiring export, are now outperforming average students far away from the capital.

Much as one might wish to surround Mr Cherry's parish with a vista of sexual volcanos, exploding brightly for as far as the eye can see, this longed-for corrective hardly justifies one of the strangest educational ventures since the Russells founded Beacon Hill.

• Schools
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Catherine Bennett
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Liz Truss trots out baseless arguments. Common sense tells you even the highest-qualified practitioner only has one pair of hands and one pair of eyes

Government proposals to alter the childcare ratios in nursery schools are turning into a fiasco. Despite universal opposition from both parents and practitioners, the minister behind the strategy, Liz Truss, continues to trot out the same old, baseless arguments. She says that it's the qualification of childcare staff, not the number of staff, that matters. But common sense will tell you that even the highest-qualified practitioner only has one pair of hands and one pair of eyes.

The consequences of her actions will surely come back to haunt us. Children will suffer physically and emotionally.

She says that the government has consulted on these proposals. Rubbish. Perhaps the minister can explain why, as the largest membership organisation representing around 14,000 providers and the largest voluntary operator of childcare in areas of deprivation, we were not one of the 40 organisations she claims to have consulted before launching this ridiculous policy? Perhaps she was already aware of our members' position on the matter.

The More Great Childcare consultation about childcare ratio changes was a sham. At no point were the sector or parents asked if they thought ratio relaxation was a good idea. Instead, the consultation asked how best these changes could be implemented. How biased and distorted is that?

The minister says that the new ratios are voluntary. Tell that to childcare providers based in deprived areas – where it is proved that children need the most one-to-one care – who face the choice of either cramming in more children in a desperate attempt to lower fees and stay competitive, or risk closing and abandoning the families they support.

Last autumn, the Pre-School Learning Alliance consulted with more than 550 day nurseries and pre-schools about ratio changes and 94% said they would not be able to provide the same quality of care if ratios were relaxed; 75% said they would be unlikely to lower their childcare fees even if they relaxed the ratios, with many citing a desire to improve staff wages.

The consequence of ratio changes will be a reduction in the overall quality of childcare in this country. We will see the emergence of a two-tier childcare sector, with more prosperous areas retaining the current ratios because parents can afford the higher fees, while nurseries in disadvantaged areas will either be forced to close or relax ratios to take more children in order to remain solvent.

Is it a coincidence that current childcare ratios are found to be restrictive and unnecessary at the same time that the government is desperately trying to ensure that it can actually deliver on its promise of 130,000 places for disadvantaged two-year-olds by September, with another 130,000 places needed by next year? The government has admitted that there is currently a shortfall of 55,000 places. Increasing the number of children per childcare worker by up to 50% seems like a very easy way of creating more places without the need for any additional government investment.

Neil Leitch is chief executive of the Pre-school Learning Alliance

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• Early years education
• Education policy

Neil Leitch
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Conservative appointed to David Cameron's policy advisory board says other schools lack 'commitment to public service'

Their numbers includes Olympians, royalty, television stars and journalists but the return in force of Old Etonians to the heart of government has put them on the defensive amid accusations of cronyism and elitism.

The latest Old Etonian recruit to the government, Jesse Norman, said Etonians were dominant in the government because other schools do not have the same "commitment to public service".

Jesse Norman defended his former school, saying ministers wanted state schools to emulate its ethos.

Old Etonians in prominent political positions include David Cameron, his chief of staff Ed Llewellyn, Cabinet Office minister Oliver Letwin, new policy unit head Jo Johnson, and his brother, London Mayor Boris Johnson.

Norman, the Conservative MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire, who was appointed to the prime minister's policy advisory board this week, said: "Other schools don't have the same commitment to public service. They do other things.

"It's one of the few schools where the pupils really do run vast chunks of the school themselves. So they don't defer in quite the same way, they do think there's the possibility of making change through their own actions. Of course, they are highly privileged – it would be absurd to deny that – but the whole point of what [education secretary] Michael Gove is trying to do is to recover that independent school ethos within the state system, so that people from whatever walk of life can feel that they can take a proper part to the maximum."

Norman said the £30,000-a-year school continued to focus on "old-fashioned" principles that helped its students succeed. "Things like rhetoric and poetry and public speaking and performance are incredibly important to young people succeeding in life," he said.

Norman said that he knew some of his government colleagues from his school days. "I didn't know any of the people at the top of government when I was at school. I did know Boris. He was a couple of years below me. But then everyone knew Boris. He was a rather distinctive figure. Jo is much younger. I knew Cameron's brother slightly, but he wasn't in my year," he told the Times.

Norman said it was "tragic" that class still appeared to be important in Britain. "I wish we could find some way of creating a society which was freer in its own mind about that," he said. "The problem is when you have a preoccupation with class, you get people believing that they can't succeed. I've no doubt that the big universities are dying for more people to apply from less privileged backgrounds, but they aren't getting them. That's one of the problems."

• Private schools
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• Education policy
• Schools
• Jo Johnson

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Jane Thynne felt concerned that her 13-year-old daughter was spending so much time online or texting that she had no time to think her own thoughts. So she banned all electronic screens from her bedroom after nine o'clock at night

At 13, I would spend long vigils beside the home telephone every evening, calling the friends who I had seen all day at school to resume our conversation. Everyone did. It's normal for teenagers to require constant interaction with their peer group, while other figures, like parents, vanish to the margins, and I saw nothing strange about spending hours crouched in our hall, discussing embarrassing teachers and hilarious friends in forensic detail. Sometimes, an exasperated parent would wrench the phone out of my hand, forcing me to skulk back to my room.

Last month I imposed the 21st century equivalent of wrenching the landline from my 13-year- old daughter's hand by imposing a computer curfew. This entailed removing her laptop, phone, Game Boy and all other screens from her room after 9pm at night, about an hour before she goes to sleep. The aim was to allow her this hour to think her own thoughts. An hour of interior life.

Our children, like most of their friends, are accessorised with both laptop and mobile phone. As a result, the potential for constant communication with their friends is ever present. Texting begins early morning and lets up last thing at night. Friends wake them up, friends say goodnight and Facebook fills all the gaps in between. The sweet, individualised ring tones that signify when a particular friend is texting beep from 6.30 am to 11pm, chirruping their insistent way through supper, homework, bath time and sleep. On the bus, kids attach their headphones and carry on. Technology embraces our children, like ourselves, in a warm electronic sea, and the tide of it comes ever higher.

Does this matter? Susan Greenfield, the neuroscientist, thinks it does. Last month she told the BBC Radio 4's Today Programme that this "cyber-lifestyle" is rewiring our brains and even without making a value judgment, we need at least to acknowledge that there is an issue.

Others are not so wary of making a value judgment. Nicholas Carr, in his book The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, claims that "loss of concentration and focus, division of our attention and fragmentation of our thoughts", is changing how our minds work, creating shorter attention spans and making reading harder by destroying "the linear, literary mind". Sue Palmer, in her new book, 21st Century Girls, goes all out for total technological cold turkey. "Allowing electronic strangers into a girl's bedroom before her mid-teens is an extremely bad idea. If parents want their daughters to establish healthy sleeping habits they have to bite the bullet and insist that their bedroom remains a technology-free zone."

Especially for girls, with their intimate, gossipy, social natures, the drive to remain as connected as possible with friends is overwhelming. Yet perversely, floating in an electronic sea has the deeper effect of depriving them of the habit of being alone, developing their own thoughts. Needless to say, my efforts to explain this to my daughter were pretty hapless. I dredged up the example of the hostage Terry Waite who got through years chained to a radiator in Beirut by the sheer strength of his interior life. My daughter listened politely, but her expression was incredulous. When was she ever going to be chained to a radiator in Beirut?

As a writer, married to another writer, Philip Kerr, I had one other, overriding concern. The key thing children miss out on without that moment of solitude before sleep, is reading. A generation ago, if you saw a light under a child's bedclothes, it would be a torch illuminating some secretive paperback. Now the light under the bedclothes has changed to the blue phosphorescent glow of a laptop or an iPad or a phone, and it's a dead cert that no one is reading Jane Eyre.

The concern that children aren't reading isn't new, of course – there's a survey practically every day. A report by Professor Keith Topping for this year's World Book Day, which looked at the reading habits of 300,000 pupils, found that reading ages were actually declining. Increasing numbers of 13 and 14-year-olds opted for books with a primary-school reading age.

Topping warned that that if children don't engage with more sophisticated books, they will fail to engage with more sophisticated ideas. Universities complain that literature students arrive unable to master a full Victorian novel, so they have to study in bite-sized chunks. One English tutor from a Russell Group university tells of the time she asked her undergraduates to read Daniel Deronda. 'What, all of it?' they chorused in astonishment. I don't believe you can overstate the case for literature, but whatever you think about the importance of George Eliot, reading also develops key life skills, including the empathy to place yourself imaginatively in another mind and the ability to sustain deep concentration.

My children would be the first to point out that I'm as bad as any teenager in wasting time on Twitter and Facebook. Those addictive social networks account for at least half an hour of my day that I won't get back. Yet it seems a more grievous thing to rob a child of the chance to read. Particularly when I had the best of chances myself.

As a teenager I spent time with my uncle, John Carey, an English professor, and his wife Gill in the Cotswolds countryside. Their life seemed pretty rarefied compared to my south London schoolgirl's existence. They didn't have a television and they took country walks, during which John would talk about books, writers, plays and poetry in his uniquely gossipy yet insightful way. I remember a long discussion about Edward Thomas and the effect that his depression had on his poetry, which ended with us at Adlestrop itself, where part of the famous Edward Thomas poem is inscribed on a bench in the bus shelter. It was a transcendent moment in which literature and life seemed to co-incide.

Yet here am I with my heavy-handed computer curfew. Luckily, our daughter has taken to it. She reads and loves poetry, but I know I'm just Canute trying to hold back the tide. I can't help envying previous generations of parents who didn't have to face this addictive electronic onslaught in their efforts to give their children a bit of time on their own. Adults can subscribe to computer programmes like the Freedom internet blocking software, which forcibly prevents them from social networking for several hours a day. They can even turn off the internet router, though that doesn't stop access from a 3G phone. But the fact remains that for children, the chance to be alone and read, write or simply think, is vanishing in our connected world. We should do everything we can to help them reclaim a small desert island of their own in the electronic sea.

Black Roses by Jane Thynne is published by Simon & Schuster £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39, including free UK p&P, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846

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Will nine-year-old Toffee's question stump a bestselling writer?

Writer Jon Ronson replies: Really clever people try to find meaning in coincidences. One time the famous psychologist Carl Jung was treating a patient. She was telling him a dream she'd had about a rare golden beetle. That second, one of those exact rare beetles landed on his window. Jung was so freaked out, he grabbed it, gave it to her and told her the coincidence had a meaning – that she was too sensible and that she'd be happier if she started believing in magical things.

Sometimes I feel sure coincidences have meanings, too. Like, every time I look at my clock lately, the time is 11.11. But our minds play tricks on us – we forget when we look at the clock and the time is 11.12. Psychologists call this Confirmation Bias – our weird tendency to only notice information that confirms our existing beliefs.

This might seem a gloomy answer, because if coincidences had meaning it would give the world an extra layer of magic. But then our weird brains are amazing, too.

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The education secretary's messages are often at odds with the guidelines and standards that teachers must work by

If there's one thing teachers appreciate it's consistency. We like to know what's expected of us; what we're being judged by, what we can expect from all parties, students included. It makes up happy because we like to plan ahead. In fact, planning is part of our way of life. We appreciate it.

Then there's Mr Gove. He is an aberration in the education system's consistency. Why? Because he is consistently inconsistent. This is one of the myriad of reasons he makes us unhappy.

Let's look at the evidence. "The quality of teachers has a greater influence on children's achievement than any other aspect of their education." Mr Gove said that, he said exactly that in those words. But then he encourages free schools and academies to employ unqualified teachers. How does this great piece of thinking dovetail? It doesn't, Mr Gove. Consider this rehashed version, my version:

"The quality of pilots has a greater influence on aeroplane safety than any other aspect of their flight." Would you fly in a plane with an unqualified, not fully trained pilot? Thought not. I do accept one case is a risk to education and the other a risk to life and limb but I'm sure you get the point. If Gove means what he says, why on earth employ unqualified teachers? It's a nonsense.

Next up: the Teachers' Standards. Very nice, very proper. Who would argue against them? Not me, Michael. But you see, there's that problem of inconsistency again. Firstly, how do the unqualified teachers sit with these? Must they meet them without adequate training? It took me four years to train.

Secondly, let me run that quote by you again: "The quality of teachers has a greater influence on children's achievement than any other aspect of their education." Does Ofsted check on this? Not always. You see Michael, the great British public is under the impression that their children are being taught by teachers; qualified ones too, I'm guessing. But that's another inconsistency you aren't addressing. A vast number of foundation subject lessons in primary schools, except PE, are delivered by teaching assistants. That was the price of PPA (planning, preparation and assessment time) wasn't it Michael?

Schools can't afford supply cover or to have a non-class based group of teachers (that could "float" around school) can they? So to provide PPA and leadership time, the teaching assistants and cover supervisors move in and teach RE, geography, history, art, DT and so on. But here's the rub: when Ofsted calls, these teaching assistants are replaced by the teachers. Ofsted doesn't ask the pupils: "Who usually takes you for geography then?" They don't observe the teaching assistants do they? And those lovely teacher standards aren't applied to the teaching assistants are they?

Do parents realise this when they read about your concern for education Michael? No. That's because most parents are completely unaware that this even happens. Ask a parent of a six year-old this question: "Are you happy that your child is regularly taught by an unqualified teacher or teaching assistant?" and see what response you get. Don't get me wrong, some of these teaching assistants deliver excellent lessons. They do a great job. But they're not qualified, or judged, or paid like teachers. It's wrong.

How about the new national curriculum? Any inconsistency there? Of course there is. You say it is necessary, vital, an essential reform. We must reintroduce learning by rote, memorising facts. Children must be tested on their memory capacity; not their skill level in interpretation or creation. But Ofsted is looking for teaching that uses assessment for learning; constant reaction to a fluid situation, imaginative planning and skilled, differentiated delivery. Even the Teachers' Standards call for this.

And the greatest inconsistency of all: you say the new national curriculum is "essential" but tell your pet free schools and academies they can opt out of it. Truth is, you know the new curriculum will restrict schools and teachers so offer them the carrot of escape via academy or free school status.

You're consistently inconsistent Michael. Some call it hypocrisy. And we teachers don't like it.

Today's Secret Teacher works in a primary school in the north of England.

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