I would like you to consider a word that is disappearing from our vocabulary, not because people don't know what it means, but because the opportunities to use it are regrettably few.

That word is carefree, an adjective that was often used to describe childhood.

I was prompted to remember this word when I heard the story of a local secondary school girl who hasn't been feeling well. A previously sunny child, she had apparently become anxious about the health and safety of her family, prone to tummy aches and a general, but debilitating, feeling of malaise.

Questioning produced no easy answers. She wasn't being bullied at school, she was in fact quite popular. Homework, whilst irksome and bountiful was not a major problem. Family affairs were stable. There were no external circumstances readily available to explain this child's decline into intermittent unease, anxiety and those mysterious aches and pains.

A visit to a sympathetic doctor elicited a very clear and revealing diagnosis. Revealing, that is, to the family of the girl; the doctor had seen it all before, far too many times recently.

This pre-teenage girl is suffering from stress.

She is one of many, apparently, who are buckling under the pressure of all those policies, targets, league tables, inspections, examinations, debates, ministerial papers, Governmental edicts you get the picture.

It's not the teachers' fault. They have been leaving the profession in their droves not merely because they are seeing how undervalued they are in terms of salary.

They are leaving because they are being actively prevented from doing the job they are trained to do. Lack of resources and an excess of dogma-driven paperwork has combined with the palpably absurd notion that all institutions should be doing better than all the other ones to turn our education system into something that Lewis Carrol could have had great fun with.

It's not the parents' fault either. The ones that do pile impossibly high expectations on their primary school children's heads, do so because they have been persuaded by the drip, drip, drip of the media's reporting of target setting, league tables and double-speak about parental choice that their children should simply be DOING BETTER!

I was tested at school, of course. We had termly exams, and detailed reports that graded us within our forms. So it was that, at the age of 12, I came 35th in Penmanship. But these marks did not cause public concern. Teachers were not set targets as a result of my messy writing. The school did not slip down a league table and threaten the headmaster with special measures.

Small surprise that at the sharp end the children for such they still are, although they haven't been allowed to be for some years are picking up on the stress and anxiety that pervades education.

So we pluck the childhood away from them, and with it the word carefree sacrificed at the altar of the great god League Tables. The Quest for Best.

Encourage good teachers, make it less of a ritual dance through Employment Law to get rid of the few bad ones, free the profession from the paper and we won't be threatened by the mass exodus of classroom assistants too, as they flee from the absurd notion that the untrained should take over the classrooms while the trained fill in some more forms!