“Students are frustrated at being in an era of tick-box teaching… The only sense of worth is in the grades received... Learning only takes place if it’s in the exam.”

These statements came not from a weary teacher, but from Emily and Michael, two secondary school students speaking to more than 500 teachers and school leaders at the SSAT National Conference in Manchester on Friday morning. From the video clips at the outset, this conference was firmly focused on learning, as all good education conferences should be, but it was hearing the articulate voice of young people talking about the purpose of education that really caught the mood.

In contrast to the education portrayed by Emily and Michael, 11-year-old Megan talked about the need for a rounded education that prepares children for life, while 15-year-old Philip told the conference movingly how his teacher, Mrs Bailey, had believed in him and supported him to overcome the problems caused by his dyslexia. “Reignite your original belief in education and believe in every child that comes through your doors,” Philip told the audience.

The speaker with the unenviable task of following these young people was Professor Tanya Byron, talking about the important topic of the mental health of children. Like Philip, Tanya had been dyslexic and was told that she would never be a high-flyer. There aren’t many people who have flown as high in their career as Tanya Byron and that was due, she said, to Mrs Moore, who had been her Mrs Bailey.

The teaching profession has many Mrs Baileys and Mrs Moores, but there are too many who have felt constrained to become box-tickers, whose teacher education and experience has been entirely in the era of narrow curriculum, low trust and unintelligent accountability. Fear has grown among teachers to the extent that one head said to me recently at a conference “You’re wrong”, when I said that schools have the flexibility to develop a curriculum that would be of more help to disadvantaged students. These teachers didn’t come into the profession to tick boxes on endless forms and lesson plans, so where has it all gone wrong and, more importantly, how can we put it right?

As head of mathematics in the 1970s, I led a mode 3 CSE course (Certificate of Secondary Education - for those for whom O-level was too difficult), for which we designed the syllabus, set the examination, marked it and awarded the grade, with our standards kept in line with national expectations by an external moderator. Similarly, 100 per cent coursework in GCSE English gave teachers the opportunity to design an assessment model that ensured that the breadth and depth of coverage through the two years of the course was fully reflected in the assessed material written by the students.

Like all secondary teachers of that era, and primary teachers pre-1988, I had an enormous amount of autonomy to devise a curriculum that was most appropriate for the students in my school. It was professionally stimulating for teachers, motivating for students, and provided a high-quality education, but nationally the system lacked consistency and was open to abuse. As a Conservative government education minister once said to me, “We can’t have coursework for exam grades because we know that teachers cheat.” He had been told this and he couldn’t be persuaded otherwise. The cause of teacher-led curriculum and assessment was fatally wounded.

I am not advocating a return to the freedom of the 1960s and 1970s, when standards were nowhere near as high as they are now, but the pendulum has swung too far.

In the years that have followed, teachers have largely ceased to develop the curriculum in their schools, accepting from the government and examination awarding bodies a high degree of national prescription that has taken away much of their curriculum autonomy. We hardly bat a professional eyelid as government ministers routinely interfere with the detail of the curriculum, in a way that secretaries of state for health would not dare do to doctors and surgeons. It has become part of the accepted culture of schooling and it has led, gradually but inexorably, to the tick-box curriculum of which Emily spoke at the SSAT conference.

We must become curriculum developers again if young people are to have the rich and varied, broad and balanced, education that properly prepares them for their futures.

There are straws in the wind - primary schools that are going above and beyond national prescription and enriching their curriculum in line with the ethos of their school; the Whole Education network of schools that is developing many ways of giving young people a fully rounded education; the SSAT network; some confident chains of schools and multi-academy trusts; the Headteachers’ Roundtable with its new baccalaureate model; and many more schools, often working in partnership with others to share ideas, that believe that the professionalism of teachers includes the design and development of curriculum and pedagogy.

John Dunford is chair of Whole Education, a former secondary head, a former general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders and a former national pupil premium champion.