Schools haven’t exactly been falling over each other to become one of Labour’s new charitable trusts but you would expect the headteacher of the first one granted the status to be fairly upbeat about it. Surprising it is, then, to read what Paul Kelley, Government adviser and head of Monkseaton High School has to say about the initiative which caused the biggest backbench revolt of Tony Blair’s premiership.

  “Trust and academy schools might prove a powerful tool for improving education – and might not,” he says.  “Allowing many people to go down different paths does not necessarily mean they will discover better solutions that will then spread across the education system.”

 Monkseaton, a 850 pupil comprehensive in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear, became a trust last August with Microsoft Education as a partner and links with The Open University, ahead of the 12 trusts approved earlier this month.

 The Government hopes that the link up with an external partner such as Barnardo’s, Cranfield University and Unilever and more autonomy for the schools in running their affairs will improve standards in the classroom.

  Inviting Dr Kelley to join the initiative, Lord Adonis, the education minister, said Monkseaton would be a “national trailblazer” but Dr Kelley, in his new book “Making Minds” pours scorn on the idea that de-regulating and replacing their local authority masters by the Charity Commission and the Government would in itself bring about improvement.

 “What is missing is the recognition that improving learning needs to work through a new scientific process. Removing a layer of bureaucratic legal constrains created to organize and direct schools is useful, but not system changing,” he says.

 It’s no use tinkering with structures when the very heart of the education system is rotten, he argues. Children spend more time chained to their desks at school than they do watching television; education aspires to right social injustices but in reality it often reinforces them,  schools are like prisons trying to change behaviour through compulsion and routine…..Can this be the same Paul Kelley the Conservatives branded a Labour Party stooge after his complaint about Oxford’s rejection of Laura Spence, his brilliant pupil, was picked up by Gordon Brown and used to berate “elitist” universities over their alleged bias against comprehensive school applicants?

 The headteacher says he has never met Mr Brown, or had a conversation with him and which political party he supports is irrelevant because in his view, teachers and not politicians or civil servants should be setting the agenda. Children and parents have almost no input into educational policy, instead those deciding what is good for them are very often the products of fee-paying schools and some do not even use the services they direct, he says.

 Often their vision of education is out of date, he says, sharing his experience of “a very senior civil servant” who persuaded ministers to spend some spare cash on Latin because it was “the bedrock of a good education”.

 He accuses politicians of using a permanent revolution of policy initiatives to avoid criticism and create a short term impression of improvement. Governments of major economies like to argue that standards are improving because exam results are going up, but grades can easily be manipulated.  Results for GCSE and A-level go up every year but “of course English education is not improving steadily over all these years”, he says. A simpler explanation is that the incomes of exam boards depend on schools choosing their qualifications and schools depend on parents thinking results are improving so they switch examinations if things do not go well.

 So far, so depressing but Dr Kelley then goes on to lay out his plans for a complete overhaul of how and what children are taught .  He questions whether young people need two years of nursery education, 11 years of compulsory schooling followed, for nearly half the population, by two years in the sixth form and a further three or four at university to be prepared for the rest of their lives.

 His experience of education systems in the United States, Britain and India has left him wanting nothing less that a revolution in what and how children are taught. The primary aim of much education seems to be to keep young people controlled and busy learning subjects at odds with the skills they will need in later life.  A whole industry has grown up writing text books so boring that no-one except schools would buy them.

 At this point you expect a lecture in the use of new technologies from the man who has linked up with Microsoft to bring modern foreign languages to 1,500 primary schools and The Open University to bring degree courses to 400 secondary schools.  Instead he recalls visiting a school with a white board in every classroom where only one was in use – to keep children quiet by showing a popular commercial film.

 “Simply using a new technology will not make education better,” argues Dr Kelley.  What is needed is a fundamental change in teaching and learning based on science instead of educational myth and political imperatives. “What we have today is an education system based on ignorance. The irony of a system created to educate everyone that does not even know how children learn is obvious, but tragic.”

 The revolution has already begun as recent discoveries in neuroscience reveal the secret of how we learn, such as the research by Douglas Fields, the American neuroscientist, into long term memory and what makes us remember some things in our lives and forget the rest.

The key, he argues, is learning that has repetition with distractions in between and it appears true that children learn better in short bursts interspersed with leisure activity.

What is needed is not more tinkering with school structures or the curriculum but a global drive to improve learning based, like medicine, on scientific evidence. University departments of education would be merged with the social and biomedical sciences under his blueprint.

 Once teachers know how to foster flexible, independent learners there will be no need to cram teenagers with facts they leave behind in the exam room.

 That’s why he wanted trust status; to formalise the existing links between Monkseaton, Microsoft and The Open University and reclaim the education system for pupils and teachers. It’s a powerful argument but before he gets a chance to make minds, he will have to change a lot of minds about the way schools have been run for decades.

 Liz Lightfoot

Liz Lightfoot is one of England’s most respected journalists