I don’t know if this is apocryphal or not, but I heard of a case around 40 years ago of a town in England where all the buses were whizzing around the city but not actually stopping to pick up passengers. The reason was that the new timetable could only be adhered to if the bus drivers didn’t waste precious time stopping at bus stops.

Yes, I hear your protest that this flies in the face of common sense, that the whole point of the bus service is to take people on a journey, not meet the needs of an artificially and apparently mindlessly conceived timetable, but with an army of inspectors waiting at the depot clutching their clipboards, what driver would be brave enough to “do the right thing”?

I’ve observed lessons in which the teacher feels obliged to race on in order to get through the scheme of work. That results in some, if not all, students being left behind. It almost certainly results also in students not being able to explore an issue in depth. In other words, it leads to either floundering, frustration or both.