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Whenever politicians pontificate about education, I think about Susan and Vicky and the raggle taggle but brilliant bunch I taught in the Merseyside new town of ­Skelmersdale in the mid-80s.

It was the toughest job I’ve ever done and sometimes the most rewarding. My students ranged from 16 to 60, but they all had one thing in common.

They had been left high and dry by politicians, were struggling to get by during the harsh mid-winter of Thatcherism and clung to education as a hope of escape.

I never had a student ask for time off for a gap year or a skiing trip.

I did however have students who sometimes missed a lesson because they were working shifts in the bakery or chip shop, or who had to look after a sick baby or care for invalid parents.

One of my best was a woman in her late 20s, Susan, who by rights should have gone on to degrees and universities and a great fulfilling career.

On the day of the exam, she wasn’t there. Her abusive husband had forbidden her from taking it. He didn’t want her escaping to anywhere.

I think about her, and the rest of them, whenever I hear someone from the Westminster village sounding off emptily about education.

How I long for these “experts” to be shoved in front of a class for longer than the usual vacuous photo opportunity.

I’d love them to have a go at teaching Hamlet or algebra or the industrial revolution in an underfunded overcrowded secondary school in Peckham or Hull or East Kilbride.

If you baulk at the thought of PMQs, Humphrys or Paxman, you really aren’t made of the right stuff to handle a class of bored, demotivated hoodies on a raw winter’s Monday morning in Barrow or Brixton.

It always amazes me how, in politics, incompetence and inexperience is regarded as no hindrance to high office. Indeed, it seems to be a boon.

Take Jeremy Hunt, the Forrest Gump of Westminster, always skulking somewhere in the background of great events.

Having cataclysmically mishandled Culture and Sport, he was shunted off, terrifyingly, to Health where he now gets to boss around and lecture nurses and surgeons, women and men whose gowns he is not fit to tie up.

(Image: PA)

I wouldn’t put Education Secretary Michael Gove quite in the Jeremy Hunt bracket. He seems, I’ll grudgingly concede, reasonably capable.

But he is also utterly wrong about education, as someone might well be who has never stood in front of a class, except for some PR stunt.

Someone who has never had to inspire or discipline a kid.

Never had to deal with a violent teenager, break up a fight or console a bullied child or support a vulnerable one.

It’s not just “ bonkaroony” to use his own cringeworthy phrase. It’s plain wrong. Not good enough. See me.

Michael Gove’s latest big idea is the I Level. In 2015, if he gets his way, pupils will be assessed according to a complicated new series of grades.

They will have their chances to resit exams curtailed and will find coursework largely replaced by exams.

One big super exam full of dates and kings and queens and rote-learned facts.

Coursework has become a soft target for the educational traditionalists when it most closely resembles what kids will face in the world of work.

Real life involves knuckling down to tasks over a long period, not cramming your head with dates for one artificial memory test.

Whenever I hear voices raised in protest against the soft option of “coursework” and in praise of the good old-fashioned exams, I remember Susan.

Her two years of commitment and great work were gone in a moment, marked by an empty desk in a draughty gym.

Gove says no coursework will reduce parents’ influence on grades. Then why not abolish private education, Michael? Why not let students resit an exam as soon as possible?

By making life harder for pupil and teacher, the right-wing show what they think of the state sector.

Tory activist Tim Montgomerie smirked yesterday: “While I would love the nation’s children to be taught History Gove style – all Henry VIII, Shaftesbury and Churchill – I wouldn’t like Ed Balls having that power”

In other words, we want to stamp out your ideology, but not ours. We’re not all in this together. It’s a battle. You and your kids are the enemy.

Gove’s proposed reforms have been trumpeted as “sweeping” and “the most radical in our generation” as if this were a good thing.

In fact, the last thing our kids need is another political shake-up. English schools are reeling from them.

The last nasty trick was to remove the grade of “satisfactory” from the Ofsted inspectors’ report on schools and replace it with the grade “requires improvement”, which implies the school is unsatisfactory.

Let the Government lie and dissemble.

This is nothing to do with improving education – it’s about breaking up the state education system, that horrid egalitarian system with its nasty agenda of social cohesion, fairness and accountability.

Gove’s battle is utterly ideological. When someone like the ludicrous Toby Young can open a free school with no qualification, you know lunatics have taken over the classroom.

Perhaps I shall open a neuro-surgery academy or a flying school. Who cares that I haven’t the faintest idea what I’m doing. It doesn’t stop the Tobys of this world.

The situation now is insane. When kids do badly, it is because the teachers are workshy communists. When kids do brilliantly, it is because the exams are too easy. You cannot win.

Unless you are a politician serving his time in Education, with an eye on a job upstairs maybe.