Well, I was a teacher at the time the National Curriculum was brought in, and I said then that it was a blunt instrument intended to beat teachers into submission following a decade of what the government characterised as our "militancy". All content, all fact-stuffing and no scope for teachers to be imaginative. To be assessed by a massive tick-box programme that has been shown to be corrupt for decades (I could regale you for hours with the inconsistencies, the cheating and the massaging of assessments I saw). Note that Thatcher excused public schools (independent schools, yanks) from having to adopt it Oh yes, only those toffs were "responsible" enough to be trusted. Same for those ideologically-driven "free schools" today. Impose on that a bureaucratic nightmare of form-filling and ludicrously-complex preparation and marking regimes for every state school teacher in the country and a draconian and utterly unsupportive inspection regime that was, initially at least, peopled by failed teachers or those who couldn't take the heat who had had three days' training. I'm afraid that education has always been a political football in this country. It wouldn't be half so bad if any of it had actually led to better standards, would it?