I was watching David Cameron doing a public Q+A session on TV a week or so ago. In response to a question from a teacher he began to explain where the Conservatives stand on education and, in particular, how they will ‘Restore Order and Discipline in the Classroom’. One of the ideas he pushed quite strongly was to do away with the requirement to provide parents with 24 hours notice of detention. Good soundbite: let's get tough on the little blighters, show 'em who's boss, eh?

But I wonder how many schools would actually make use of the legal right to detain without notice? There are good reasons why schools give parents 24 hours notice; and those reasons don't go away if you remove the legal requirement for notice. I believe that detaining children after school without notice would do nothing other than damage the relationship between school and parent. Many pupils have familial responsibilities outside school time, from collecting younger siblings to doing shopping on the way home. They may also have appointments with a dentist or doctor. How thrilled would you be if your family visit to see Gran in hospital was kiboshed by little Johnny being an hour late home from school without notice? Even if a child didn’t have a commitment after school, many are wily enough to claim one – leaving the teacher in the position of having to either substantiate the claim with a phone call home or accept it:

The overhead projector revolutionised the teaching world. It could turn the most mind-numbing lesson into an even more mind-numbing lesson through the power of electricity. Teachers could swap acetates and stories of bulbs fusing at the most inappropriate times, with students stunned into silence by the power of technology. One hour lessons were turned into 20 minutes of learning because the teacher couldn’t get the projector to work or put the acetates upside down.

Next came the photocopier, an educational innovation that has stood the test of time. Reams of paper used world-wide in industry and education. The beauty of this little baby was that it could produce photocopies of one page at a time of the ubiquitous text-book. Clear and multiple copies of page 73 of ‘teach yourself geometry/algebra’, poems could be handed out from Shakespeare’s sonnets, pictures of ox-bow lakes could be glued into exercise books. Or, indeed, if a text book was torn you could photocopy all the book. Lessons didn’t need to be prepared, you just took the text book to the photocopier, join the queue of the other 60 like-minded teachers and your day was done. Some schools even took on a technician to do the photocopying for the staff. At the end of the week, this pale and partially blinded human emerged from a small room carrying large piles of text-books for re-distribution to the staff, secure in the knowledge that they would all be back again the following week. If the copier broke down, hundreds of staff would gather like a lynch-mob at the technician’s door blaming him/her personally for ruining their lessons. Alternatively, the staff would have their own machine which always jammed with no-one accepting the blame.

As I sit here in my office, the head of a large all boys comprehensive, it’s easy to look back at the days free from National Curriculum, massive testing, APP’s, league tables and Ofsted and think how stress free those days were and how free I was to prepare my lessons in any way I saw fit.

Oh yes, walking into school knowing that my imaginative English lessons could be a riot of inventiveness that delighted the students into obedience. And then I hit the text book, filled with pages and pages defining nouns, adjectives and adverbs in dull, black print. Chapters from stories that no-one had heard of and, least of all, of any interest to inner city, Liverpool boys who had never been fox-hunting or to Corfu. Worst of all, you moved from boring text book level one to rigor mortis text book level 5 with nothing else really available until……… along came the banda machine, a revolutionary device designed to liven up any lesson. And what was this technological breakthrough? Well, its main components were: a large drum with a handle; a compartment into which you poured ink; large sheets of paper covered with film which was attached to carbon paper. You filled the drum, attached your sheets of hand-written, innovative lesson planning to the drum, then turned the handle and, miraculously, you had thirty copied sheets of hand-written lesson which you handed out to the awe-struck students individually. There were, however, a couple of drawbacks: the ink, if still fresh, would smudge the sheets into illegibility and cover the students, and your, hands; the success of the sheet depended entirely on the legibility of your handwriting and, if you were very brave and typed your sheet, you could never be sure that the carbon sheet would align with the top sheet, so you had a hand-out that was at 45 degrees.