The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has launched an extraordinary attack on the “oppressive” system of state education in England.

In a speech, he said that an “obsession” with repeatedly testing and assessing children undermined their personal, spiritual and emotional development.

Dr Williams insisted that the focus on examination results and targets categorised pupils as “successes and failures” at a young age and damaged the morale of teachers.

The comments were made in a speech to head teachers of a new generation of Anglican secondary schools.

The Church of England now sponsors 27 academies – independent state schools, backed by churches, charities, entrepreneurs and universities – with plans for eight more.

Dr Williams suggested that the schools were successfully addressing the needs of individual children in the face of an education system that “seems to have lost a great deal of its liberating potential”.

The comments come just days after the publication of the biggest review of primary schools for 40 years which called for Sats tests and league tables to be scrapped.

The Cambridge Primary Review concluded that the focus on exams in English and maths had caused significant “collateral damage” as children were drilled to pass at the expense of other subjects such as history, geography, art and science.

Dr Williams said: “We have in the past few decades created an extraordinarily anxious and in many ways oppressive climate in education at every level in the search for proper accountability.

“This search is laudable in itself, but its outworkings have been unhappy: an inspection regime that is experienced by many teachers as undermining, not supportive, an obsession with testing children from the earliest stages, and in general an atmosphere in most institutions of frantic concern to comply with a multitude of directives.

“All of this gives a clear message about the priority of tightly measurable achievement over against personal or spiritual or emotional concerns. We are in danger of reintroducing by the back door the damaging categorising of children at an early age as successes and failures.”

Addressing head teachers at Lambeth Palace, Dr Williams praised the Cambridge Primary Review, even though it was dismissed by the Government as advocating a “backward step”.

The Church of England is now the biggest single sponsor of academies, which are granted special freedom to tailor the curriculum, admissions and teachers' contracts.

Dr Williams said the academies programme represented a “challenge” to head teachers to show that it was feasible to run a school “without buying into the over-anxious habits of so much of contemporary educational practice”.

This included providing more time in the school day for art, sport and the development of children’s spiritual needs, he said.

“Much anxiety is generated each year by the late summer stories of inflated grades and falling real standards in A-levels,” he added. “But this is a little bit of a distraction from what a growing number of people see as the underlying problem, which is the narrowing and reducing of educational practice in response to mechanical ideas of accountability. “One of my own strongest hopes for the Church’s Academies, as indeed for all Church-related educational institutions, is that they will be able to model something better and more creative for our educational future.”

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "We do not subscribe to the view that testing is excessive in schools - children sit just one set of national tests between starting school and the age of 14.

"Ministers are clear that drilling or narrow test preparation is wrong - we are working with social partners to ensure that preparation for tests is proportionate, educationally appropriate and does not put undue pressure on pupils.

"Transparency and accountability in the schools system are non-negotiable. It would be a retrograde step to return to the days where the real achievements of schools were hidden from parents and communities. That is why we remain committed to the regular independent inspection of all schools.

"Inspection highlights schools’ strengths and weaknesses, provides schools with recommendations to improve, promotes a culture of rigorous self-evaluation and triggers action where improvement is needed."

(www.eduwo.com, Jainlyn&Charlotte)