Nicky Morgan has given school children a lesson in industrial action

“Weaponising” the schoolroom will count as one of the greatest blunders of Ms Morgan’s time in office

Parents plan to boycott primary school tests by keeping children off school (Getty)

“Industrial action”, to use an old-fashioned term, is more usually a symptom rather than the cause of a problem in the workplace. While strikes can certainly exacerbate tensions and do little in themselves to solve underlying problems, they are a sign that one side, at least, feels so hard done by they are prepared to take steps to pressure the other.

It is still more remarkable, then, that parents and children themselves, rather than a trade union, are mounting their first ever “strike” tomorrow. Such has been the intransigence of the Government over the testing of six and seven year olds that parents would prefer them to miss a day of schooling rather than sit through the SAT exams. While technically illegal, there is little that in practice the Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, can do about the situation. Sequestering the piggy banks of the nation’s kiddies is not an option that even the most martinet of cabinet ministers is inclined to take, though the Schools Minister Nick Gibb looks like he’d quite like to have a go.

The point is that both sides in this dispute have allowed what should be a fairly pragmatic discussion about the balance between academic rigor and fostering creativity among very young children to become a sort of kindergarten version of the great miners' strikes of the past, complete with mini-me pickets and hectoring Tory politicians. The junior Scargill de nos jours has yet to emerge. If nothing else it provides those barely old enough with an introduction to the notion of industrial action as a legitimate weapon. Indeed “weaponising” the schoolroom – for this is unlikely to be the last such action – will count as one of the greatest blunders of Ms Morgan’s time in office, whether she is right or wrong in her arguments. The time has long gone when the parties should have started talking and being sensible, rather than behaving like, well, a bunch of kids having a scrap in the playground.