Teachers urged to 'take risks' inspires pupils

Britain's teachers should go back to taking risks in the classroom to inspire a love of learning among their pupils, the leader of the country's preparatory schools will say today.

Diana Watkins, incoming chairman of the 600-strong Independent Association of Prep Schools, will use the association's annual conference in Liverpool to call for an end to the "tick-box culture" under which teachers currently work. "You can't just open up children's heads and tip information in," said Mrs Watkins, the headmistress of Leaden Hall School in Salisbury, Wiltshire.

She added that the present structure was "dampening down" inspirational teaching. "Anybody who is being judged as a result of their test results is going to start making the best job they can out of it – teaching to the test," she said. In addition, she said, teacher-training courses prepared students for a more regimented environment.

Mrs Watkins recalled her own English teacher, who insisted formal lessons stopped at 2.30pm every day so she could read books and poems to her pupils. "She inspired in me a love of language when I was only 10," she said.

Mrs Watkins believes greater autonomy is needed to bring back "passion, enthusiasm and individualism" into teaching. "It is ironic that we encourage our children to question the world in which they live and to have inquiring minds, [but] we are not empowering teachers to do the same," she will tell the conference.