Are Yorkshire teachers the best? I can safely assure everybody that the answer to this question is, of course, a plain and unequivocal “yes”. 

My plain-speaking Yorkshire tongue may be firmly in its cheek when I present the evidence, but doubtless it will still cause upset and indignation in more sensitive regions. All being well. 

What is true for Yorkshire Tea is even more the case for Yorkshire teachers - “Everything’s done proper.” Everyone else should take a leaf.

Don’t look for your evidence for pedagogical superiority in the fancy and facile world of league tables and Ofsted judgements, where regional comparisons have always borne an unsurprising and uncanny correlation to social and economic conditions. 

Inform yourself instead by heading off to anywhere in the Yorkshire Dales. Step out for a stroll and you will soon realise that it’s not just the children who benefit from the infinitely superior teaching and training found in this county. 

The ‘North-South divide’: Flawed methods of judging teaching quality

What will impress you even more than that divine rolling landscape and immaculate stonewalling will be the unremitting politeness of the local Yorkshire sheep. 

Without being asked, they always quietly make way for you at stiles. If they could, some of them would skip forwards to open the gates for you. In Yorkshire sheep you get none of the hysterical retreating and bleating so often experienced in lesser regions.

It’s a similar story with the county’s cows. They and the sheep saunter calmly around their own preferred fields of learning, each one ruminating and chewing the cud, proactively engaging in their own independent learning. And the bovid catch-up programme is to die for. 

The point is that this productive pastoral learning environment hasn’t just happened by chance. It’s the result of consistently hard toil and high-quality teaching and training there for generations, whether it’s of a sheepdog, shepherd, cowboy, cowgirl or waller. 

As for the upbringing of Yorkshire’s human offspring, just consider the overwhelming range and volume of talent that has been consistently emerging from Yorkshire’s schools for more than a hundred years now. 

Much as I would enjoy doing so, I can’t begin to list here the rich crop of excellent sports performers, entertainers, authors, poets, artists, musicians, scientists, explorers and engineers benefitting from their exceptional educational upbringing in one of the Ridings. (Admittedly, there are one or two notorieties as well, but we’ll move swiftly and conveniently on there.)

In fact, as someone from Yorkshire has probably already told you more than once, watch out again for Yorkshire competitors in the Olympics this summer. If the county had been a nation, it would have come 12th in the international medals table in the London Olympics, and only a couple of places lower in the one after that.  

The ridiculous idea of sending ‘superteachers’ up North

None of this should surprise anyone. The county and its education services have a long history of being at the cutting edge. As we know, it was the MP for Bradford, William Forster, who was the driver behind primary education becoming compulsory for all from 1870. 

There was the pioneering post-war West Riding Education Authority, under Sir Alec Clegg, whose dynamic team of post-war developers included my father, I am proud to add. 

More recently, the nation wept in admiration at the many inspiring teachers in Educating Yorkshire. (No, we’re not mentioning Manchester, either.) 

All of this evidence proves absolutely nothing, of course, other than to illustrate that exam results, progress measurements and Ofsted reports are not the only way of presenting a completely flawed and unfair way of comparing the quality of teaching and schools across different regions of the country. 

At least measurements such as “quality of local sheep” take out the gross distortions caused by deprivation and disadvantage. They don’t lead to ridiculous suggestions that so-called superteachers should be paid to go into counties like Yorkshire to “help out”. 

Education generally needs to reset and take a leaf from out of that Yorkshire Tea: “Let’s have a proper brew.”

Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire