I was 16 in 1983 at the height of the Thatcher years. My school was lucky as at that time it was only 20 years old so had none of the leaky roofs and buckets in classrooms commonly suffered by older schools. 

One vivid memory was having one English literature textbook on Macbeth between three of us. 

Homework was staged over three nights as the book was passed between us and the excuse of “But Sir, Jenny forgot to bring it in” was given quite legitimately when homework could not be handed in on time. 

Parents rang the head teacher with their concerns as this problem spread to other subjects. 

Our parents refused to pay for textbooks as they believed the school, via the government, should fund this basic equipment. Hence homework taking four days to complete.

Many local schools where I had other friends were asking parents to provide exercise books, too, as well as textbooks to do O-levels, sitting in classrooms with huge cracks in ceilings and well in need of a concerted paint job throughout.

My eldest two sons did their GCSEs under a Labour government back in 2005 and 2008. 

I can frankly say I never paid for a single textbook in all that time. We had voted for “Education, education, education,” and it was delivered. 

Although we had school league tables, they were certainly not the be all and end all and my boys received a good-quality education where subjects were taught and valued by enthusiastic teachers with resources. 

School trips to enrich the learning experience, especially at GCSE level, were commonplace. 

All GCSES were done in year 11 after a two-year period of study in June of that exam year. Labour had introduced swathes of different subjects too, so the less academic of students achieved practical NVQs. Every child mattered and every child was valued. Is it only a few short years since education was that good?

Fast forward to the years 2013-14. My two younger sons are now 15 and 16. The youngest is autistic. 

There have been four head teachers in four years, each with a new vision of doing things, which has led to my youngest son’s year being the “guinea pigs” for every different method aimed at doing one thing only — getting the school rocketing up the league tables. 

Where once we had education, education, education now we have league tables, league tables, league tables. 

“To hell with the subject” is the mantra, as long as we get kids getting A*-C grades. 

Now the GCSEs are fast-tracked into one school year, which is effectively eight months. Exams are mostly taken in May, not June. 

To get more results to boost the league tables, children in year nine take two option GCSEs, then a further two in year 10 and the rest in year 11. Some parents say it suits their brighter child, but the vast majority have seen the soul-destroying way it is taught, without resources.

Westminster has definitely not ring-fenced the education budget. It is a lie. Cuts are being made drastically. 

There are not enough GCSE textbooks to go round. Teachers are covering this up by photocopying large amounts of handouts and asking pupils to put them in folders. 

Concerned parents like myself have had to turn to online retailers to buy books so the children have a copy of their own for school and home. 

One GCSE textbook for home economics is specific to only our exam board at the cost of £20 each. 

One teacher, on noticing both my sons had their own geography textbooks, rang me personally to ask whether I would consider donating them to school after the summer exam, as she only has eight to cover the entire class. 

Another older, experienced teacher told me at parents’ evening that she was buying the latest textbooks for her class out of her own pocket as she said it is a catch-22 situation. 

“If the children don’t have the textbooks their results will be noticeably lower. This will reflect on me as a teacher through the league tables.”

Schools are now slaves to the league tables. Getting up the league tables is the entire raison d’etre of head teachers. Their jobs depend on it, their funding depends on constant improvement.

So why not put younger pupils in year nine and 10 up for exams early and boost results further? The children only have eight months to cram the coursework and the subject in, school trips have to be missed, but hell it’s OK because it’s the school league tables that matter. This is what is going on in many schools currently. 

The constant pressure to outperform the previous year’s results has now boiled down to a constant treadmill of exams over three years where the exam, not the subject, is taught. 

The children sit at desks all day going from topic to topic cramming in two years’ work into eight months. With little love or knowledge of the subject, they are taught to merely be instruments of passing the exam itself. 

And those who are C/D borderline are helped the most while A/B students are left to their own devices. Why? So those pupils are pushed to get a C not a D as this reflects on those blasted league tables.

At parents’ evening I watched the teachers flicking through huge folders of extraordinary statistics as they searched for my boys’ grades and predicted grades at GCSE. 

I actually spent a lot of time questioning them on their stress levels. My sons are experiencing revolving doors of supply teachers across a range of subjects as teachers are ill with stress-related problems. 

It was very rare in my teenage years for a teacher to be off sick — in fact it was a talking point if they were. 

Now stress is unmanageable in the teaching profession, which has a huge impact on our children. 

As my youngest son wearily showed me the options list for his final year next September, we picked two options purely because both teachers are never sick and buy the class textbooks themselves.

My sons will look back at their secondary school days as one big exam roller-coaster in years to come which simply satisfied the monster that is exam league tables. 

They too will recall the lack of resources, as I have done. It is no coincidence that Tories were in control of the Department for Education on both occasions. 

State education suffers under Conservatism, full-stop. Rich Tory MPs don’t have to worry as their children attend well-resourced private independent schools. 

The working class must fight back and say this system and lack of resources is not good enough for our children. 

We demand a world-class education. Our children deserve it. One tip to Michael Gove — the champagne budget in the House of Commons has risen 72 per cent under the coalition government. Spend it on education instead.

Bernadette Horton blogs at mumvausterity.blogspot.co.uk