I have no doubt that the Cambridge Review of primary education amassed plenty of academic reports. And it has some good recommendations to show for its six years of work - primary schools should employ more specialist teachers in subjects like languages, for example. But in its headline conclusions - which it surely always intended to reach - it has seriously missed the point in its prescriptions for the future of primary schools. Scrapping SATs, messing about with the school age and downplaying the basics would leave poorer pupils the poorer educationally.
We have a short memory. Back in the mid-1990s, when the first national tests were introduced, there was a national outcry when fewer than half of 11-year olds pupils reached level 4, a level that demonstrates a good understanding of English and Maths. Today, 70-80% reach that standard, in part due to the pressures of external scrutiny.
But there are still too many below par primaries. And the only effect of removing that scrutiny, as the Review effectively proposes in suggesting that national tests be replaced by teacher assessment, would be to leave those schools to their mediocrity.
Then there is the question of what age children start school. Four and five year-olds are not spending their time sitting in Gradgrind-style serried ranks copying their Victorian ancestors, as media reports suggested on Friday. The review team cheerfully encouraged such perceptions, even though one assumes they know that key stage 1 classes are very different. it took a headteacher in the Times to put them right.
More likely that the report's authors wanted to stop five year olds learning reading through phonics; now, that would be a disaster for our schools and disadvantaged children, in particular.
And then there was the lazy accusation of Stalinism. The academics who produced their own hugely complex learning grid for primary schools should follow were really complaining about was a fairly relentless focus on tried and tested methods in English and Maths. If schools succeed with their own methods, nobody complains or stops them. But for weaker schools - such as those in Tower Hamlets that now match schools in leafier suburbs - those traditional methods have made a huge difference. As have floor targets, setting minimum standards for every school.
The truth is that the authors want primary schools to lose their focus on the basics and to return to a secret garden, where individual independent school-level data is scrapped. That may please the teaching unions. But it would do nothing for those youngsters for whom failure in primary school is a recipe for lifelong underachievement.
