Today, a colleague and I found a box of ancient lesson plans – and we were delighted to pick over them. Oh, how standards have improved since Tony Bliar won an election by declaring his three top priorities to be, “Education, education, education,” and explained, “Our children will learn more and they will earn more.”

These plans were truly appalling. One page covered an entire day; no curriculum cross referencing; no three-level differentiation; no specified learning outcomes; no activity objectives; no starter or plenary; no key vocabulary; no facility for evaluating or recording how well the lesson went. Under current guidelines, Ofsted would have marked those lessons as “fails” before the lesson had started.

It’s amazing how far we have progressed from those Dark Ages of education to the new enlightened era of New Labour education policy. Thanks to their continued vigilance and the hard work of Ofsted, all lessons are now extensively documented to prove that teachers are doing everything in their power to deliver Tony Bliar’s 1997 election promise.

Meanwhile, according to 2007 figures published by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, primary school literacy has fallen under New Labour; numeracy has failed to improve despite massive investment and interference new initiatives by the Government; most damning of all, after more than a century of stable but steady growth in social mobility, the ability of children from lower-income families to achieve higher-income jobs is now in decline for the first time since the peak of the Industrial Revolution.

And people ask me why I pay school fees…