In 2000, however, Woodhead came to the conclusion that his views were so out of sympathy with the Labour government that, despite some successes, particularly in approaches to literacy, he had no option but to resign. Since then he has been active as chairman of Cognita, directing and running more than 50 schools in the open market, and a regular columnist for the Sunday Times. At Buckingham University he and I set up what he himself calls an "anti-department of education", training teachers with success and in ever greater numbers.

In Michael Gove we now have a Secretary of State for Education actually criticising public exams, and much of Woodhead's thinking resonates with the current administration, but not at the most crucial point of all. For Woodhead's experience at the highest level led him to the conclusion that the state cannot successfully run the nation's schools. Twenty-three years of state control of the national curriculum and exams have shown such a dream to be pure and reprehensible utopianism: the weight of the educational establishment and the demands of populist politics are just too great. Power ought to be returned to parents and schools: "schools funded by, but otherwise independent of the state, free to decide their own admissions policies and to define their own individual ethos, competing with one another in the market place," Woodhead wrote in 2009, "then we would have some clear blue educational water." Unfortunately we won't. It is not only with Labour that Woodhead is out of step, for the Coalition seems as wedded to government control as anyone else.

As is well known, Woodhead is now in an advanced stage of motor neurone disease, catastrophic for anyone, but particularly for one for whom rock climbing and hill walking were so vital. He has been as brave, direct and frank about MND as about education. But whether expounding his literary and artistic passions — John Cowper Powys, Peter Lanyon and, above all, Geoffrey Hill — or upholding his educational philosophy, for all the cruelty of the disease, his great voice has not been silenced, nor his mind stilled. Those who care about the future of the nation's children should heed what Woodhead is saying — in its entirety.