Chris Woodhead used the first annual lecture by Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector to attack what he describes as the unhelpful influence of progressive methods whereby children are expected to learn by discovery and are never told anything.

In particular, he castigates primary classes where children work on different activities in groups, with teachers as facilitators. He says the commitment to such organisation among teachers remains intense and widespread. Despite much evidence which suggests it is easier for teachers to explain new material and challenge their pupils when the class is taught as a whole, there remains hostility to such an approach, he says.

He cites an unnamed experienced local authority officer talking about the typical primary classroom and asking: “Why is it that I rarely, if ever, see a primary school teacher teach anyone anything?” Teachers, he suggests, find it hard to accept that different forms of pupil groupings need to be adopted for different teaching purposes.

The theme echoes the report of the so-called Three Wise Men (Mr Woodhead was on the team), which also concluded that many primary teachers did not question orthodoxies, but he insists that secondary teachers are equally guilty of “unquestioning and ultimately irrational commitments” .

The culture that often prevails in schools, according to Mr Woodhead, is characterised by the belief that education must be relevant to the immediate needs and interest of children, and that the teaching of knowledge is less important than the development of core skills.

There are teachers, he says, who reject the notion of a national curriculum that sets out the minimum children should be taught, ignoring their socio-economic circumstances or “readiness” for learning.

To raise standards, says Mr Woodhead, ways have to be found to render classroom culture less resistant to change. Teachers have to be more open-minded, more sceptical of the received wisdom, more flexible and probing, less eager to take refuge in what he says are simplistic and untenable dichotomies such as the child versus the curriculum, or topics versus subjects, or so-called active learning versus didacticism.

While he acknowledges that the national curriculum and its testing framework and the inspection schedule have an impact on schools, legislation, he says, cannot deal with the pernicious effects of ingrained beliefs or corporate resistance by schools.

He says: “But the problem is not merely a resistance to change. It is, as I say, a commitment to particular beliefs about the purposes and conduct of education: beliefs which constitute the real impediment to the development of a better educational system and which lie, of course, far beyond the legislative ambitions of even the most interventionist of governments.”

In conclusion, he argues that the immediate need is to turn from the preoccupation with recent legislation to take on the priority issue - “our vision of the educational good, our expectations of what children can and should achieve and the teaching methods we use as we seek to initiate our pupils into the best that has been thought and said.”

The assault on primary teaching methods is likely to alarm schools due for inspection. The first indications are that a higher proportion of primary schools are more likely to be failing than secondaries. Since primary inspections began in September, 11 of the 778 schools visited have been judged to be failing to provide adequate education.