A final report from the Chief Inspector

There is nothing sadder than a preacher without a pulpit. In the years when Chris Woodhead was lording it as Chief Inspector of Schools, his polemics were deadly. They were also an entertaining public spectacle. He was the licensed, turbulent priest. Ministers smirked outwardly and squirmed inwardly as, yet again, he upset their carefully stacked applecarts. It's always good to see a politician writhe.

What was most deadly in the chief inspector's subversions was the timing. On the same day that the minister delivered some major (and carefully leaked) "policy initiative", Chris would turn up on the Today programme to rubbish it. Gillian Shephard or David Blunkett would duly protest - through gritted teeth - how greatly they valued their inspector's "robust" criticism.

Woodhead's critique of the British education system was simple. Standards were not inexorably rising. Fifteen thousand teachers were "duds". Three out of 10 headmasters in Britain's 24,000 schools were certifiably incompetent. Local education authorities were meddling busybodies. Inner-city schools were a disaster. Ofsted was a good thing. You wanted proof? So many teachers (duds) hated it.

The Government's plan to enlarge university intake to 50 per cent of the population under 30 was "learnocracy" run mad, Woodhead maintained. The country doesn't need ill-educated graduates in "golf-course management". It needs skilled plumbers and electricians. The ideologues in the university institutes of education are full of - well, let's call it ideology, although it smells like something else. What the teaching profession needs is less trendy theory and more common sense. Why rebrand teachers as "learning managers" when many of them couldn't manage their way to the classroom door without three directives from Whitehall to point them in the right direction?

Of course the private sector in education should expand. It works. That's why the top five universities in the country take 50 per cent of their undergraduates from fee-paying institutions that represent a mere seven per cent of the total school system. Of course A-level exams are made easier year by year. That's why pass rates rise so dramatically year by year.

All governments should have a gadfly on their rump. Woodhead performed that irritant task admirably. He made his masters unhappy, and we loved him for it.

It couldn't last and the wonder was that it lasted so long. On leaving his post with a golden handshake and a sigh of relief that shook the Millbank windows he went off to be a columnist (gadfly at large) on The Daily Telegraph.

It doesn't seem to have worked. Woodhead lacks the necessary fluency. He's a thinker with one powerful thought. Nor, it has to be said, does he write as well as he lectures. This book has the leaden feel of text unloaded into a tape recorder. He has now, one hears, taken up a professorship at the University of Buckingham, a maverick institution wilfully outside the state sector. It will suit him.

"The Book Every Parent Should Read", as the shoutline instructs us, is unnecessary. Every literate parent in the land knows what the former chief inspector thinks. Class War (nice title) adds little to what Woodhead has been telling the nation, repetitively, for more than a decade. That little is, however, interesting. He wishes he had been more outspoken as a government servant. He believes he was fed cooked data as chief inspector. He suspects that the present minister, Estelle Morris, is - underneath all that hard-nosed Blairism - a closet 1960s "progressive". He despises Margaret Hodge, the absurdly entitled Minister for Lifelong Learning and Higher Education.

For all the invasive brutality associated with his inspectorial regime, and his one-man awkward-squad antics, Woodhead was a force for good. It's always fun to watch a wrecking ball at work. I miss him; don't you?