The concept that the government should have any say whatsoever in education is absolutely fucking ridiculous to me. Just give schools the money they need to run effectively and let educators work with humanities and scientists to design the system and keep politicians the fuck away from it.
Seems sensible but if we imagine that by some measure, like PISA, our children seemed to be stagnating or going backwards, who will be accountable? Then a PM will say, elect me and i will take responsibility.
It's annoying but also inevitable for as long as we demand that our PMs fix things and be accountable.
Obviously you can't guarantee that and when a politician says such a thing then we still want them to take accountability. How do you guarantee it we would ask and they would say, I will blah blah blah. But what they can't say is i would hand over some money but not direct how we set standards or curriculum or whatever.
I am with you, personally, just pointing out the political difficulties.