“I’m dreading going back to school,” said Anne. “It’s going to be so much harder.

Everything will be different. My friends all feel the same.” The start of a new term – anxiety, fear and trepidation grips those for whom the new academic year will mean a whole new world: teachers.

A new curriculum for all pupils from reception upwards; new exam regimes for GCSEs and A-levels; new tests and record keeping in primary schools.

The government’s latest proposals, supposedly designed to improve standards, have been brought in with a haste that has given little or no time for teachers and their assistants to receive adequate training.

There are more facts to learn, coursework assessment is to be replaced by terminal exams; we are returning to a system that favours those who can remember facts rather those who can consistently apply an argument. Two years’ study will once more be decided in just six hours of stressful, frenetic writing.

Five-year-olds are to be taught to use complex sentences and history is to be taught in chronological order so that the complexities of medieval politics will now have to be assimilated by seven-year-olds.

Schools have adopted phonics as the government’s preferred method to teach reading, with words broken down into component sounds and reading tested through a child’s ability to sound out meaningless combinations of letters.

The warnings of a growing number of children’s authors that the creativity, imagination and ‘magic’ of the world of books will be lost on those for whom reading has become a mechanical process go unheeded. In Norway children don’t start school until they are seven; by eighteen they have overtaken us. ‘Learning through play’, a buzzword for early years when I was teaching, has been replaced by literacy and numeracy hours.

In secondary schools the chaos continues. “I don’t know how we’re going to fit everything in – there’s so much more in the syllabus,” a secondary science teacher confided in me. “It just means that there’ll be less time for practicals – which is what science is all about…”

Education is a political football. As the gap narrows between political parties, each of them fights for the allegiance of voters in the middle ground. ”A return to traditional values,” is the call of politicians brought up in privileged private education (that they continue to purchase for their children) giving dubious credibility to their prognoses for a state system for the rest of us.

“I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to keep going in teaching,” Anne said with sadness. “I just want a job where I’m not worried that I’m going to have to leave my principles at the door when I go to work.”

That our children do so well is down to the dedication and professionalism of our teachers and the excellence of the schools that we have here in Salisbury.