If there is one quality in teachers that society should value highly, it is the power to imagine. It is possible to teach without much imagination, but there is no doubt that children are more likely to remember the inventive rather than the dreary. Sally Sparkle makes a greater impact than Silas Grim.
Each year, this characteristic stands out among the teachers, heads and classroom assistants nominated by pupils, parents and public for the National Teaching Awards. Teachers can be effective without being especially imaginative, but it is a lot more fun when their effectiveness joins forces with imagination.
There is every reason why teachers should be encouraged to be creative. First of all, Britain needs it. We are an inventive nation, producing Nobel prize winners, as well as leaders in the arts, business, literature, fashion and popular culture. It is a proud heritage that must be sustained and enhanced. Others envy us for it, and Pacific Rim countries, such as Japan and Korea, aware that conformity is useful but limited, have put "individualism" high on their list of millennium aspirations.
Second, we need to urge teachers to shake off the fetters that have shackled them to government-prescribed teaching strategies. Why should every primary school maths lesson be in three parts, but every literacy hour in four parts? This happens only because officialdom has decreed it. It is the contemporary equivalent of yesterday's teachers flogging uncritically and without deviation, page upon remorseless page, through dog-eared, brain-dead textbooks. Imaginative teachers conjure up all kinds of structures for their lessons.
Third, teachers are important role models for children. The way we teach them, as teacher or parent, is part of their life curriculum. Those whose parents tell them stories, play games, sports, sing, swim, explain the world, will in turn do the same with their own children. Teachers who use their imagination to make lessons interesting and thought-provoking are more likely to produce children who can create and invent than those who appear bereft of such qualities. Teaching is a social gene, transmitting not only important facts, interpretations and understanding, but also attitudes and manners from one generation to the next.
The regional and national winners of the Teaching Awards being celebrated this year embody the best of these valuable qualities and traditions. Indeed, a whole recruiting campaign should be built around them. I have worked with trainee teachers for over 30 years and can testify to the importance newcomers attach to being allowed to use their initiative. Mature entrants regularly cite the challenge to apply their creativity as a reason for leaving their previous job and becoming a teacher.
Yet trainees are faced with a huge list of competencies to be ticked when they start their course and are often discouraged from straying too far from the schemes of work produced by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority once they enter school. No wonder four out of 10 recruits drop out, either during training or by the end of their third year of teaching. Imagine the effects of a recruitment slogan that said "Become a teacher and follow your daily instructions to the letter", "Tick a thousand boxes for Britain", or "Can you teach children and bore the pants off them at the same time?".
The regional and national winners this year were of an exceptionally high standard. During our final meeting to select the national winners, judge after judge described the difficulty of discriminating between the very good.
There were so many top quality people that any one of them could have won. Previous national winners, now members of the judging panel, expressed relief that they were not candidates this year, as the competition was so stiff they would not have fancied their chances.
Many headteachers were regional winners for working with others to reinvent their school. This was not solely after a period of trauma, because some winners were in schools that were already excellent and still tried to improve. Teachers and classroom assistants who did well were people whose imagination came to the fore in what might have been a deadly, routinised job.
Parents often spoke graphically about their children's enthusiasm being fostered in both primary and secondary schools. There were ICT specialists whose pupils produced high-quality output, not just for themselves, but sometimes for their community.
In the end, human imagination triumphs, for it is one of the great forces of nature. Bury it under a heap of manure and it will thrive. Shackle it to a wall and it tears itself loose. Dump tons of concrete on it and it still winkles a way through. There have been enough attempts to suffocate it in teachers, but fortunately it is indestructible.
· Ted Wragg is emeritus professor of education at Exeter University and chair of the National Teaching Awards panel