THERE was a bigger punch-up on the BBC’s Any Questions the other night than in the whole of the Wales-England rugby match which was going on at the same time.

The subject was education and the Catholic journalist Cristina Odone said: "The most inspiring teachers I've ever encountered were not out of teacher training college. You know what, they taught values, not British values, they taught real values."

Tristram Hunt, shadow minister of education, interrupted: "These were nuns. These were all nuns, weren't they?"

Afterwards, he apologised saying he had not meant to insult nuns but to make a general point about schooling.

We know what this point is, because it is central to Labour’s statist ideology according to which it will be compulsory for all teachers in state-funded schools to be qualified - and would reverse the coalition government's decision to allow free schools and academies to recruit unqualified teachers. This would be a fine thing if it could be shown that state-enforced teacher training was of any use. There is plenty of evidence to show that it produces less competent teachers than those found in the private sector where pupils’ achievements tend to be higher.

There is one knock-down argument which completely undermines Labour’s ideology: if the only way a pupil can receive a good schooling is by teachers who have passed through the state-enforced teacher training system, how did anyone get educated in all the centuries before there were teacher training colleges and university departments of education?

Pity all those engineers, scientists, writers, artists and musicians who lived in the 19th Century and earlier and therefore went without the benefit of a so called “trained teacher”.

How the devil did James Watt, John Constable, Jane Austen and Edward Elgar achieve their eminence when their teachers had never attended a teacher training college?

Besides, Labour’s educational ideology begs a huge question: the notion that teaching is a professional skill that can be taught.

I don’t believe it can be taught and I agree with Cristina Odone that the most inspirational teachers were never subjected to the ideological claptrap purveyed by the teacher training colleges.

I speak from some modest experience. When I was a teacher – untrained, because the statist enforcing diktat had not yet been imposed - at a state secondary school in Bolton sometime in the last century, most of my colleagues had been through the state training system.

These included the maths teacher so innumerate that he had to get a pupil to reckon up the dinner money on a Monday morning. Then there was the English teacher who couldn’t master the apostrophe – let alone the subjunctive mood.

For reasons beyond my ken, I was asked to serve on the Associated Lancashire Schools Education Board (ALSEB) and on the BBC Schools Broadcasting Council (SBC). It was part of the work of these bodies to examine the sorts of things they got up to in the colleges of education.

Mostly this was that form of child-abuse called “pupil-centred learning” and those other recipes for pedagogical chaos and intellectual squalor “open plan classrooms” and “groups not streamed according to ability".

I saw the damage first hand. When I made criticisms in ALSEB and the SBC, I was reviled and generally shouted down by the commissars and apparatchiks who mainly constituted those committees.

The state education system is a failure. The education department itself admits that 43 per cent of our children leave school after eleven years of compulsory state schooling unable to read, write or count efficiently.

Let’s have more nuns.