Public school head calls for a 'holistic education' to create more well-rounded pupils

The state system is guilty of producing "factory schools" turning out young people "incapable of living full and autonomous lives", the headmaster of a leading public school claims today.

Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington college and Tony Blair's biographer, says too many students cannot think independently about their subjects, lack personal skills, and are "little more than well-drilled automatons" after an education that lacks intellectual depth and rigour.

He calls for all state schools to be given the opportunity for genuine independence, with legal freedom to make a profit, select pupils as they wish, and choose their own curriculum and exam system.

The school day should be longer so pupils can benefit from the kind of "holistic education", encompassing extensive programmes of sport, culture, and leadership training on offer in public schools.

"Too many state schools have become factories," Seldon writes in a pamphlet, An End To Factory Schools, for the Centre for Policy Studies. "Reluctant students are processed through a system closely controlled and monitored by the state … The new world does not need container-loads of young men and women whose knowledge is narrowly academic and subject-specific which they can regurgitate in splendid isolation in exams."

An unprecedented increase in education spending under Labour has failed to produce better schools, Seldon says. He argues that the "choking" influence of centralised oversight holds them back.

Many of the same problems are found in universities, he says. "There, too, individual students are obliged to meet the requirements of a pedestrian exam monolith, creative teaching is sacrificed to instruction and transmitting the right or approved answers, and students have an increasingly narrow quality of all-round education as higher education increasingly loses sight of its mission to educate the whole student."

Seldon makes 20 recommendations to ensure the return of "delight, gratitude and stimulus" in schools which have become too large, de-personalised and exam-focused. His changes include more active learning, with regular experiments making a return to science classrooms.

Schools should be free to set their own disciplinary regimes, with zero tolerance of bad behaviour; the exam system should be restructured to end the "stranglehold" of A-levels and GCSEs in England and Wales, which is failing pupils.

Inspections should only take place at poorly performing schools, he says. Any institution with more than 600 pupils should be broken up, similarly to houses in public schools, with its own sub-head. There should also be a radical restructuring and slimming of the education "establishment" which has myriad quangos.

All schools should become legally autonomous within five years if they can handle independence, Seldon writes – and the overwhelming majority should be able to do this.

"By the early 21st century, the factory school model was all but complete," his potted history of state education says. "Children arrived at nursery school at three or four and left school at the age of 16 or 18. The production line for children in school consisted of lessons punctuated by bells, which resulted in classes trooping off to different parts of the factory, from which they eventually emerged 11 or more years later with exam passes as the validation of their personal and school career.

"The factory was owned and operated under the strict top-down instructions of government, who decreed everything that went on. It is the apogee of Fordism gone mad."

." Not all schools are bad, Seldon adds. They are full of remarkable teachers and hard-working students who sometimes achieve "extraordinary results on slender resources".

Vernon Coaker, the schools minister, dismissed Seldon's criticisms. "We just don't accept the picture of the state schools system painted here," he said. "We make no apologies for setting high academic expectations – that's no different to what any head or parent in the independent sector wants.

"Schools were in very poor shape 13 years ago, so we were right to take a tough, centralised approach to turning round entrenched educational failure. It's worked – exam standards have been higher and there have never been more good or outstanding or fewer inadequate-rated schools.

"It's right now to step back and rebalance that approach to carry on driving up standards – our radical reforms give the most successful heads and teachers huge new freedoms but don't hesitate to still intervene in weak schools."