Professor Harry Brighouse, of the Institute of Education, London, said last week that many teachers were leaving the state sector and for private schools “which have a sense of lively intellectualism”.

Trainee teachers were being denied “the life of the mind” and “intellectual richness” because of an overemphasis on practical techniques, the professor told a conference of independent school heads organised by Brighton College.

He said: “Professors have hardly anything to do with PGCE. Lots of people do not want us.

“They want future teachers to be trained in techniques, they do not want them to be trained in the life of the mind, they do not want us to bring intellectual richness.”

He told The TES that teacher education is reminiscent of the time and motion studies of the 1920s. New teachers no longer demonstrated a sense of excitement for their subject, he added.

Trainees should be engaged with the intellectual life of the teacher education institution to provide a bridge between exciting cutting-edge research work and schools.

And he blamed the Office for Standards in Education for a regime “where everything had to be accounted for in paperwork and anything that you could not measure was not worth doing”.

Private schools were free from those constraints and still had a sense of “intellectual excitement”, he said. Independent school heads are able to pick up good teachers who would prefer to work in the state sector but are more confident they will get support if they work in an independent school, according to Professor Brighouse.

A spokeswoman for the National Union of Teachers said the national curriculum was “very constraining” and did not allow teachers to respond to the intellectual curiosity of their pupils.

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