The Poet Laureate today leads 200 writers and academics in calling for Michael Gove’s school reforms to be suspended.

Carol Ann Duffy heads a collection of leading figures from across the arts and education who have written to The Times saying that “incessant testing” and school performance targets risk damaging the quality of childhood.

Their criticisms are timed to steal attention from Mr Gove’s speech to the Conservative Party conference this afternoon and will revive simmering tensions between critics he dismisses as “militant Marxists”, “bad academia” and “the blob”.

Their argument received an unlikely endorsement as the leader of Britain’s foremost independent schools body warned that government education policy heralded the “funeral” of an understanding of the child.

Tim Hands, incoming chairman of the Headmasters’