Would you trust your local school to solve its problems all on its own?

If we demand professionalism from teachers, we must concede autonomy. It is time to relax the curriculum

I still owe Professor Ted Wragg of Exeter University a fiver from 1997. Half a decade ago I said that the new Education Secretary, David Blunkett, would show the Chief Inspector of Schools, Chris Woodhead, the door and put someone else in instead. Someone like Professor Tim Brighouse. Ted said he wouldn't, that Woodhead would stay, and Ted was right. I shall pay him in euros when we join.

Even so, for much of the Blair government Mr Woodhead and Professor Brighouse were the bookends of the Labour approach to schools. Grumpy Woodhead on the right bashed recalcitrant teachers and stressed the need for measurable improvements in educational performance. Smiley Brighouse on the left – a mate of the education ministers and for most of that time in charge of Birmingham's schools – talked about the need to love teachers and to foster communities. In the early 1970s many staff rooms were like this, with their caners and their hippies.

One went last year, in a characteristic blaze of anti-government hyperbole (along the lines of "everything good was done by me, everything bad was Blunkett's fault") and was recently talking about setting up whole schools where they will do things the Woodhead way. Sounds like fun. And the other is now about to retire, his quieter thoughts covered only in the pages of this newspaper. Nevertheless Professor Brighouse's exit raises much more interesting questions than did Mr Woodhead's

In a lecture to the Royal Society of Arts Professor Brighouse argued that primary school league tables should be abolished and that the national curriculum – now more prescriptive than that of Stalinist Russia – should be relaxed. Kids from deprived backgrounds, he felt, were being made to feel like failures by the tests which form the basis of the league tables. The result was "severely damaging" to these pupils.

It is harder to dismiss the comments of a man who has – in Ofsted's judgement – done an extraordinary job in Birmingham's inner-city schools, than it is to ignore the same comments made by some of the perpetual whingers which populate any profession. Even so there are some awkward questions that Professor Brighouse has to answer. Governments and local education authorities are answerable to their electorates for what happens to standards in education. But how are we supposed to know whether our schools are doing better or worse?

League tables, for instance, are valuable to parents because they establish a currency which we can recognise. Sure, if they are used wrongly, then they may be damaging. Kids do not need to know their own scores and those of their classmates. It really isn't right that schools should "cram" some of their pupils in order to push their figures up. And do we really want to return to the days when children from less privileged backgrounds were effectively written off when it came to reading and writing?

All human beings are reluctant to grant to others the things that they want for themselves. The autonomy that most of us professionals desire, and that can make our jobs so rewarding, we are nervous about conferring on other professions. We complain about post code prescription and want the waiting time for an operation to be the same in Hampshire as it is Huntingdon. We wish to know the mortality rates in the hospitals near us. These are our bodies, our kids, our taxes, and we want to know what is happening to them.

And now we have a problem. It was inspired of the BBC to invite the philosopher Onora O'Neill to give this year's Reith Lectures on the subject of trust and accountability. In her next lecture she will be tackling the consequences of what she calls "accountability revolution". As the advance publicity for this lecture puts it: "Many people find that working under these constraints can demand arbitrary and unprofessional choices. They claim that these forms of accountability undermine professional independence and integrity." Ms O'Neill herself concludes that things have gone too far. "If we want a culture of public service," she says, "professionals and public servants must be free to serve the public rather than their paymasters."

One obvious difficulty that arises is that the paymasters themselves cannot easily be held to account under these devolved circumstances. "Well, of course it's a shame about all the illiteracy," says the minister to John Humphrys, "but what can I do? I can't very well intervene, can I?"

And professions in Britain have sometimes exhibited not a sensitivity, but rather a contempt, for their clients. In one episode of Channel 4's brilliantly subversive documentary series on the NHS, The Trust, the consultants were shown to have the most appalling and manipulative attitudes towards their patients' views about resuscitation. For years teachers I knew used literally to believe that what went on in schools was no one else's business at all.

An illustration here. Professor Brighouse is a great believer in the school being a community in which the number of what he calls "specialness opportunities" – the creative relationships between teachers, support learning staff, peer tutors, mentors and learners – should be expanded. This clearly means breaking down some demarcations between the various adults who work in schools. Yet the teaching union response to the plan to enhance the role of classroom assistants has varied from the "peasants in the classroom" of the NASUWT, to the "Oh, it's OK, they'll just help with the registers" of the others.

Let's take another related example. Most agree that teaching workloads are too great. It would be a good thing to reduce contact time. This week the Government announced that it was setting up a pilot in 32 schools, under the general supervision of a working group composed of teacher, headteacher and staff unions, employers and various national bodies. The idea is to explore how all staff can be used to better effect and how technology can help.

Immediately the NUT complains that the pilot does not specifically include its own demands. The Government, according to the union, "should have been prepared to pilot the proposals... of a limit to the teaching week". This completely negative approach would have meant death to idea of schools, as units, attempting to solve their own problems.

Here we are all in a bind. The unions want to set limits to the working week which would compromise their own professionalism and tie the hands of local heads. And they are prepared to threaten parents with strike action if they do not get their way. Well, you can have the odd one-day stoppage – it's not so different from an Inset day or the school being used as a polling station. Much more than that, though, and what trust there is between parents and teachers will evaporate faster than you can say Doug McAvoy.

Yet if we demand professionalism, we must begin to concede autonomy. It is time, in primary schools at any rate, to begin to relax the curriculum and allow Professor Brighouse's communities to flourish.

David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com