Public examinations have a noble history. When they were first introduced for boys in the Britain of the 1850s, they were specifically designed to undermine patronage and corruption, and allow pupils to be judged on the basis of merit rather than background and affluence. While exams continue to have an egalitarian element, they also have huge advantages in educational terms.

Exams are a useful way of informing both teacher and pupil what has been grasped, and what direction future teaching needs to go in, and they can test the degree to which a student can interpret, analyse and evaluate competing arguments and concepts. Likewise a good essay question, no matter what the subject, requires the capacity to isolate, specify and synthesise a range of competing arguments. The discipline of exams can also develop important skills – the ability to cope under pressure, revise and memorise facts, deal with the unexpected, to structure an argument and think on your feet against the clock.

But one of the most striking messages that that comes out of Warwick Mansell’s brilliant new book is that the purpose of exams matters. In other words, the integrity of exams can be perverted by the demands and motivations imposed on them by politicians and policy makers. Mansell makes a powerful case that this is what has happened in the UK today.

Many of the contemporary arguments against exams today force me into a valiant defence of them. The arguments that most young people today are too fragile and ‘stressed’ to cope with the pressure is an insult to young people, and says more about adults diminished sense of ambition them. And the idea that personalised learning and assessment are superior to exams lacks any kind of evidence. Universal national testing at the end of key educational phases such as GCSEs and A Levels have an important place in the educational process, and should be defended. But Mansell’s critique is much more powerful and sophisticated than the usual rant about the stresses of exams. He sets out in comprehensive and shocking detail the damage that the contemporary obsession with testing is doing to education.

For me what Mansell does is show that today’s exams have come so far from their aspirational roots as to be seriously damaging to the quality of education. He shows that political interference in education and the obsession with measuring schools success has changed exams from something which were good for children to a tool primarily designed to test the success of the teachers and schools. Using the horribly managerialist language which now dominates the world of education, exams have turned into a ‘management tool’ which helps to ‘audit’ a school’s ‘outputs’.

Mansell’s account shows how this changing concept of exams has had a corrosive effect on education. If exams are now a means of monitoring the ‘performance’ of the teacher and the school – and the results will be laid bare for all to see in individual teacher assessments and school leagues tables – the obvious temptation is for teachers to become obsessed with getting their pupils through tests, to the detriment of broader educational goals. Exams are no longer about individual pupils’ achievements and development. Now they are about so much more – they influence performance related pay rises for teachers and for head teachers. They determine where the school lies in school league tables, which in turn determines what level of resources they got from local authorities. They are even a measure of whether the government has hit its own education targets.

This ridiculous level of pressure which has been externally imposed by successive governments has a corrosive impact on even the best teachers. Which teacher will risk their pay rise, or the wrath of their head-teacher by ignoring the pressures to teach purely for the love of teaching the love of a subject.

In a nutshell, the pressure on teachers to deliver the improving test statistics by which government and the outside world judges them is proving counter-productive. Schools have been turned into exam factories. A young person’s school experience is now more about exam preparation and less about learning. Young people’s intellectual curiosity is stifled. Their deeper cultural, social and spiritual faculties are marginalised by a system in which everything must be subordinated to deliver improving test and exam statistics. Though it is never admitted, drilling young people to the test at the expense of wider, deeper meaningful learning is what now happens in the majority of schools. This is the tragedy of much schooling in England in 2008.

Our government has created a situation in which teaching for results to hit a statistical target is replacing the development of the child’s intellect in the broad sense. Both teachers and students find their enthusiasm and creativity sacrificed to formulaic exam preparation. While the mantra ‘I didn’t come into teaching for this…’ can be heard in every classroom in every school, Mansell’s book is a shockingly rare attempt to offer a comprehensive challenge to the prevailing culture.

And it’s not just teachers who are in despair. Just last week the Chief Inspector of Schools, Christine Gilbert, wrote to politicians to complain that pupils are now being ‘taught to the test’. Gilbert identified an all too familiar scenario whereby teachers obsessed with getting their children through their SATs end up devoting all their lessons to practising skills in preparation of Key Stage 2 tests. Non-tested subjects like history, geography, music and art are either completely abandoned or crammed into the last few weeks of term after the tests have finished. A little late in the day, Gilbert pointed out that this approach is not conducive to ‘an all rounded education.’

Warwick Mansell charts numerous shocking examples of the perverse consequences of this narrow obsession with exams. Like the school who leapt up the league tables after realising that if they encouraged more of their pupils to take vocational subjects their average grades would go up pushing them up the hallowed league tables. The scheme worked brilliantly (though presumably not for those academic pupils who were pushed into taking vocational subjects) until exposed by a national newspaper.

Mansell also points to more subtle damage to education when he describes how some teachers have protested against the narrow and prescriptive way that they are forced to teach their beloved subjects. Instead of teaching every aspect of Shakespeare in all its richness, English teachers are now given incredibly precise instructions on how to prepare pupils in how to answer the questions that examiners will pose. As Mansell notes, ‘this approach, which eats into the time that pupils could be devoting to studying fantastic works of literature, does not strike me as likely to fire in anyone a love for a subject’.

Mansell points to the number of guidelines now created by successive education departments including one 328 page pamphlet which lays out exactly how teachers should gear their teaching to the precise requirements of the tests. And for those of us who find the prospect of reading this banal document too much - the good news is that it’s also available on CD-ROM!

Interestingly, Mansell shows that many bright people involved in education policy clearly have a deep sense of discomfort about the way things are heading. He quotes a senior employee at Edexcel, the private company that sets exams, as saying: ‘Teaching to the syllabus, teaching for results, must narrow it and tend to depress the sense of inquiry and the desire to inquire.’ Similarly Mike Tomlinson, a former member of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority board, said this after chairing a 20 month review of secondary school exams: ‘assessment needs to support teaching and learning rather than being the driver of it.’ Yet somehow these senior people seem powerless to change the direction.

Mansell also provides detailed insights into how the trends encourage cheating, have lead to a new type of official textbook which is more akin to the old-style revision pamphlets that our parents used to sneak into the house, and leads to exams being seen as some from of commercial contract between pupils (consumers) and teachers.

Fans of The History Boys will know that Alan Bennett’s brilliant and prophetic play highlighted the difference between the joy of being taught by a teacher who entered the profession for a love of his subjects and one whose role is to drill pupils with the information they need to pass their Oxford entrance exam. In the play the eccentric Hector is shown allowing the pupils to take their lessons down numerous ‘irrelevant’ intellectual avenues and to indulge their curiosity. A recent survey of the UK’s top scientists, including several nobel prize winners, revealed that almost all cited an inspirational and experimental teacher prepared to divert from the curriculum and take risks as their primary inspiration. It is tragic to think that most of our children will almost certainly never come across legendary teachers like Hector or the Robin Williams character from Dead Poets Society, and I am prepared to bet that our current education system will produce fewer nobel prize winners.

Just this week Greg Watson, the influential head of Cambridge University’s exam board, launched an attack on the politicisation of exams, accusing the government of gaining unprecedented control of the exams system and interfering in the minutiae of qualifications. Understandably politicians tackling problems in education in the 1980s and 1990s were keen to weed out poor teachers and stamp out some of the more unorthodox and hippy teaching methods of the 1960s and 1970s. But in doing so, our political leaders have shown a distrust of teachers that has come dangerously close to a contempt for teaching itself. In this climate of mistrust the traditional concepts of teaching and education are increasingly being substituted by system of exams.

Mansell concludes this important book with a plea to turn our backs on education by numbers and introduce new assessments which can judge the quality of the learning experience rather than the quantity of A-C grades. My conclusion would be slightly different – the government should train teachers well, then leave us alone, trust us to teach and let us design exams which enhance children’s education.