The national curriculum is so boring that children are becoming alienated and disruptive at school, Michael Moore, president of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said yesterday. He also said, teachers had been turned into robots obliged to teach lessons irrelevant to pupils' lives.

The Government was so concerned about meeting its examination targets that ministers were oblivious to the damage caused to children by an overly prescriptive curriculum and national tests at the ages of 7, 11 and 14.

Mr Moore told the association's annual conference that government-sponsored research had shown a decline in children's enjoyment of school in recent years. This was true for virtually all subjects among pupils aged 11 to 14 in secondary schools.

He said: "I believe that too many children and young people are turned off learning because they are fed up with what they see as a boring curriculum diet that has little choice and less relevance to their lives. No wonder they start to misbehave."

He spoke as delegates said that "parental paranoia" over testing was putting pupils as young as four under unreasonable pressure from the moment they started school. Some, particularly boys, reacted violently to being forced into formal education too soon because of the need for schools to do well in tests at seven. They called for a review of the curriculum in the early years of primary school so that learning was based more on play than structured lessons.

Phil Baker, a middle school teacher, said: "We are creating the wrong sorts of learning environment for a lot of our youngsters. We have created a system for them to fail."

(Agencies)