EARLY in September 2012 I asked a classroom of 16-year-olds about to embark on A Level courses at Appleby Grammar (comprehensive since 1962) School whether, in ten years’ time, they expected to be living in their present location, elsewhere in the county, or outside Cumbria.

I deliberately put the question without any discussion, and they answered on paper, not by show of hands.

Two-thirds thought they would be outside Cumbria in 2022; the other third were split between the Appleby area and the rest of the county.

Whether or not their expectations are fulfilled, these students were following a tradition that can be traced back to the 15th Century at least.

Succeeding generations of young people whose formal education has gone well have concluded that opportunity for advancement lay outside their home patch and left the area, in most cases permanently.

The Eden Valley – like much of the rest of Cumbria – has been, and remains, a net exporter of talent: from Christopher Bainbridge of Hilton, who died a Cardinal in Rome in 1514, John Robinson of Appleby, who kept Lord North’s government going in the 1770s, Arthur Robinson of Long Marton, the civil servant on whom Neville Chamberlain depended, to the television presenter Helen Skelton of Kirkby Thore.

Professional and managerial employment opportunities remain very limited locally.

A relatively small proportion of the intake of most Cumbrian schools comes from graduate households with children likely to be pre-schooled and precocious, on the way to realisation of academic potential before they even start formal education.

Yet in my teaching role I repeatedly saw the regenerative powers of Eden Valley communities. Parents who left school with modest formal qualifications take pride in raising children who are eventually more successful in education than they had been. And though most of these youngsters, too, will leave Cumbria, some eventually return.

This historic pattern of cyclic rebuilding on modest foundations is only a problem if unrealistic assumptions are made by those who do not understand it. In many parts of Cumbria wages are low in relation to property prices, but so are the conventional indicators of social deprivation – crime, unemployment, free school meals.

Ofsted inspectors have been apt to take these as evidence that a locality is predominantly middle-class; and if children do not achieve the SATs and GCSE results expected of leafy affluence, their schools are deemed to be ‘coasting’ or ‘in need of improvement’.

Although statistics are available to indicate the relatively low level of graduate qualifications and professional employment among Cumbrian adults – particularly in more rural parts – they tend to be ignored or dismissed as excuses.

In the past Local Education Authorities well knew their localities and their schools, and what could reasonably be expected of them. But over the last quarter century Conservative and Labour governments have dismantled local accountability in education, atomising schools and resurrecting a system of punitive external inspection of the kind that prevailed in late Victorian times and was abandoned because it made teachers and children miserable, and didn’t work.

From eccentric beginnings in the early 1990s as the brainchild of an opinionated educator-cum-journalist, Ofsted has developed into a Frankenstein’s monster with its finger in multiple pies. Arguably, it has done far more harm than good.

The mantra in its justification is that Ofsted ‘drives up standards’; England’s place in international educational league tables provides scant evidence for this claim.

Would our children learn, and our teachers teach, any less effectively if Ofsted did not exist? Might they even do better?

Local Education Authorities were born in 1902; their time may come again.