After twelve years of New Labour, during which education has been pushed to the forefront of the political agenda, things have just not got any better. The more politicians interfere in the running of schools, the more the education schools offer has become devalued and undermined. The Tories are promising to focus on formal subject-based education, but they seem incapable of shaking off the concerns of the current administration. Blaming failure on poor standards of teaching and badly run schools, they seem ready to sell off state schools and completely abnegate responsibility for the system they should be in charge of.

The election gives us an opportunity to step back from the hollow promises of politicians and ask what we want from our schools. Education has always held out the promise of a better life for pupils and their parents. But the hijacking of education’s promise by politicians bereft of anything to offer has done untold harm to the education schools provide. Politicians have failed to change society for the better, and minister after minister has burdened schools with this responsibility. After decades of crisis management of schools we now have a system no-one trusts.

Education should be a relatively straightforward process of passing on the best that has been thought and known from one generation to the next. Schools should provide children with a grounding in the knowledge and understanding of subjects that can allow them to pursue education to a higher level if they are given that opportunity. But all this has become lost in the political fog of a dying administration obsessed with proving its own political credentials. Education has come to serve the political class and not our children.

Obsessed with proving that they are giving even the most deprived children something worthwhile, schools are forced to focus on the lowest common denominator. As a result the curriculum is a meagre diet of ill-conceived lessons in the latest obsessions foisted by politicians onto children. Schools with good academic examination results are castigated for not offering easier subjects to those pupils who won’t make the grade. Ofsted grades lessons as ‘Good’ even when teaching is unsatisfactory and schools as ‘Good’ even when they fail to educate. The political imperative to use schools to make society look fairer without doing anything to change real social inequality is turning education into an Orwellian nightmare for pupils, teachers and parents.

Surely, it would make more sense to teach every pupil to the best of our ability a broad and a balanced curriculum that will allow them to find out their own strengths and weaknesses. We can’t do this unless we get politicians out of the classroom and leave teaching to the teachers who want to do the job.