Graham Carter’s column on education on Monday was spot on. I too read with horror the words of Michael Wilshaw (OFSTED chief) insisting pre-school age children be prepared for school.

If that meant following the example of the world’s best education systems there would be no cause to worry. In these systems young children learn through play. There is an emphasis on collaboration, motor-skills, building self esteem and avoidance of formal education and testing. Testing too early can lead to psychological barriers to learning that can have a lifelong negative impact. Then at the age of around seven, schools take up the more formal aspects of learning and the children are ready and take off like rockets.

But we know that’s not the idea. Wilshaw wants the opposite. For Michael Gove, facts are good when children have to memorise them by rote but to be ignored when devising education policy. Teachers do their best to boost children and make things interesting and stimulating but all the time they carry the putrid albatross of backward looking education policies round their necks.

If Michael Gove could think of a way of formally testing foetuses and feeding back on how badly they had failed the test we would be seeing that pushed by OFSTED. Fortunately we are seeing a developing campaign for education in parts of the country.

Peter Smith, Woodside Avenue, Swindon