The proposal to abandon the three-tier schools in Bedford and Kempston and return to a two-tier system has been characterised as "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change education in the town".

That's not true. Education in the town was changed from two-tier to three-tier in the 1970s. That's just 30 years ago. So, in just half the usual 'three score years and ten' this is the second bite at the cherry of improved education.

If two-tier was so wrong in the 1970s why is it so right now?

Bedfordshire's move from two-tier to three-tier was prompted by the 1967 Plowden Report on 'Children and their Primary Schools'. The abolition of the 'eleven-plus' examination was seen as freeing primary schools from the constraints imposed by the need to 'get good results'.

Teachers at the time were told they should "not assume that only what is measurable is valuable". As Kathy Sylva, Professor of Educational Psychology at Jesus College, Oxford commented in 1987, "Education is about nurturing the moral, aesthetic and creative aspects in children's development, not about 'getting the country somewhere'."

Now the Borough Council's chief executive Shaun Field is telling us "improvements in Key Stage 4 results…is the fundamental concern, because GCSE results are what get students to go on to do A-levels, go to university and get good jobs".

The supposed improvements in GCSE results from the return to a two-tier structure are also fêted by Professor Kate Jacques, pro-vice chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire. She claims "in this day and age that is what gets children into university, and it is what gets them into good jobs."

All this has the unpleasant taste of a return to results-focused learning and a cavalier abandonment of child-focused education. Where do the high-flown aspirations of Every Child Matters fit into this purblind drive to rank higher in national league tables?

As Derek Gillard wrote in 2004 on the Education in England website, "when teachers begin to notice that children learn nothing by being tested, when parents are sick of their young children suffering from exam-induced stress, when the public begins to realise that the results of national tests can always be manipulated to achieve politicians' targets…then someone, somewhere, is going to remember that 'at the heart of the educational process lies the child'."