Bethan Marshall: Boston's plain English earns him top marks

There is a wonderful moment in Tom Stoppard's play Professional Foul, when an academic is punched for suggesting that stereotypes – in this case that footballers are thugs – are occasionally true. The new head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority is providing refreshing evidence of this. Ken Boston, in true Aussie style, is calling a spade a spade. No one will be able to accuse the QCA next year of failing to alert ministers about impending calamities. "I am not at all sure that the path to next January's and June's exams will be smooth," he told MPs.

I can't imagine many British public servants coming into office and saying essentially: "You've made a pig's ear of all this exam business and I'm not sure it's going to be all that easy to fix." But that's what he did last week. The barely concealed subtext of his evidence to the education select committee was: "MPs – what were you thinking? You have been hoist with the petard of New Labour's agenda." And to the QCA: "Why on earth were you feeble enough to let this happen?"

Only the Sheila, in true antipodean chivalrous style, appears to have escaped calumny. On Estelle Morris, he said he had no criticism of the former Education Secretary. Was Mr Boston right to speak so plainly? Yes. Almost from the start teachers and lecturers warned that the AS levels were being introduced too fast and that crucial questions on how the two halves of the new exam would be assessed were not being answered.

Used to having to cope with the batty agendas of their political masters, however, and wanting to do the best by their pupils, teachers attempted to make the best of a botched job. I can remember standing in a staff room, a term into the new course, helping a frantically busy head of English download the exam board's grade descriptions from the website. It was the first time anyone had seen them. When the big independent schools weighed in, the media commentators began to sit up and listen.

That raises another much more fundamental question, which Mr Boston's evidence touches on. State schools are still the government's plaything and pupils in these institutions are subjected to a public exam regimen that the private sector can avoid. Independent schools don't have to take SATs. One of Mr Boston's suggestions – that it should take five years to bring in any new public exams – is being flagrantly ignored. The new English tests at key Stage Three for 14-year-olds, due to be taken this summer, have, at the time of writing, not been fully piloted. The ones they replace were never given much credence by the English profession, often producing results that failed to reflect the ability of the children they taught.

Now English teachers are having to prepare pupils for exams that they have not seen and train for papers that have yet to be standardised. Of course the results of these tests are not, in the scheme of things, as crucial as A-levels but this Government is keen to give them high status as a way of showing that secondary schools are improving. The pressure to succeed against unknown, untried criteria will be great.

It is hardly surprising that the National Union of Teachers is beginning to talk of boycotting the tests. The last time the unions flexed its muscles over national tests, a Conservative minister was sacked – the only successful piece of industrial action in the Tory reign.

So to end on a cliché, as we began with a stereotype, we can only hope that the new QCA boss has given that other new incumbent, Charles Clarke, a reality check. Even I was taken aback by Mr Boston's statistic that, in effect, we introduce 15 new syllabuses a week. That is a kind of madness and it needs to stop. In his words, we need "more time for learning and less for examining".

The message is clear. Perhaps, it would be useful if the new Education Secretary sat a test in a year's time to make sure he has learned that lesson. I'm sure Mr Boston would be a strict marker.

The writer is lecturer in education at King's College London

education@independent.co.uk