Some weeks ago I spoke at a conference on education of blacks in Hackney, organised by the local MP, Diane Abbott. It was full of anxious parents wanting the best for their children.

The chief education officer - a good citizen with a warm personality - opened the conference and spoke exclusively about exam results, going through the tables for each GCSE subject with the rigour of an accountant. I was taken aback; maybe, for some time now, I have been out to lunch on this education business. It is as though nothing else matters but these bloody figures. She was at one with the parents, who were taking notes. They all seemed part of a system and these were the rules.

Education has always been a ladder for Afro-Caribbeans to climb out of ghettos of colonial poverty. Parents have made huge sacrifices to this end.

They have also driven their children to despair. I recall one of the most horrible experiences of my life. I attended Queen's Royal College in Trinidad, one of the leading secondary schools in the Caribbean. The A-stream contained the professional caste that would run the country after the British left. Form 5A in my day had 16 students preparing for the Cambridge School Certificate. Carrington came 15th in the end-of-term exams. His average mark over the eight subjects was 80 per cent. He was studious and well-behaved. With the other 15 students, he was obviously destined for great things. But he was in such terror of his father that, when his low class position became known, he drank a poisonous substance, lay down and died.

Six of us were pallbearers at his funeral. And on that day the rains came and it was a task to get the coffin into the grave. His father stood there and said: "All the time yuh want to go and now yuh giving trouble." I look upon that man to this day with unbridled hatred. Ah, the burden parents and teachers heap upon children.

Today we are back to square one. Not a single child in my street has anything good to say about school. Every morning, Mrs Howe and I have to coax, cajole, and encourage our daughter to attend school. She, quite literally, hates it. She is reasonable, and intelligent; she will do fairly well at exams, I expect. But she is desperately unhappy. At 14, she has two-and-a-half hours homework a night. With the long journey to school - two buses and a fairly long walk - hers is almost an 11-hour day. Her life is not her own. No trade union would allow these working conditions for its members.She has been reduced to an experiment in the league-table adventure. The carefree attitudes of youth, the joys of irresponsibility have been replaced by a fascist curriculum administered by those in authority who are thirsty for exam results.

Any deviation meets with a merciless discipline. One of my neighbour's children was on the street during school-time. Why, I asked. She told me she was suspended for a week. She is all of nine years old, rather precocious, with the vocabulary of an adult. Her crime? She called her teacher an imbecile.

As a parent, I refuse to collude with authority in this wanton disregard for children's rights. I tell my daughter to do what homework she can and I will stand by her. Quietly, I explained to her that there is not much personally I can do about the regime. Use your computer, your mobile phone, contact other students in Lambeth, mobilise them and confront the authorities with your dissatisfaction. Strike! Demonstrate! She smiles and gives me the thumbs-up sign. With that spirit, young Carrington would be alive today and, somewhere in the world, I am sure, a professor of mathematics.

At that Hackney conference, another speaker puffed out his chest, told us that his father was a poor farmer in Jamaica and a poor worker in London. He had not whinged about poverty, and now he has a staff of hundreds and controls a budget larger than any Caribbean island. He put himself forward as a role model; there was no excuse why any black child could not be like him. Young Carrington's father flashed across my sky and disappeared into the darkness.

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