London Pupils are being "actively recruited" by schools to spy on their teachers in the classroom, a union has warned.
They are being used as "management tools" to carry out covert — and even open — surveillance of members of staff, it was claimed.
Chris Keates, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, condemned the practice as a "form of abuse" of children.
She told the union's annual conference in Birmingham on Saturday that "debilitating" monitoring "erodes teachers' self-esteem and gnaws away at their professional confidence".
She said: "Children and teachers are diminished and abused by the use of pupils as management tools to carry out surveillance on their teachers.
"Schools are being run like totalitarian regimes where children are being actively recruited to spy and report on adults."
Training
Afterwards, Keates said she had been horrified to discover that secondary schools in some areas have been taking pupils out of lessons to put them through a form of "formalised Ofsted training".
Pupils are trained in the methods used by real inspectors to assess whether teachers are good at their job. Ofsted is not involved in the practice, which has also been adopted by some academy chains.
Keates revealed that some pupils are given forms to rate teachers as part of Student Voice — a movement which involves giving pupils a greater say in the running of their schools.
These forms tell students to list the "strengths" of members of staff.
Other schools use questionnaires, which ask pupils to consider whether they are "treated fairly and equally" by teachers.
They can tick boxes including "always", "usually", "occasionally", "never" and "not sure" and complete "one star and a wish".
This involves awarding a teacher "one star for something they are doing well" and "one wish for something you would like them to do even better".
Keates added: "We've had practices ranging from children sitting at the back of classrooms, watching teachers with check lists, to unacceptable covert practices where children have been identified before a lesson starts by management."
Spelling: Tests branded abusive
British teachers have branded new reading tests for five-year-olds "abuse" and may boycott them.
Children in Year One will be required to read 40 words to check their understanding of the "phonics" system of reading.
The National Union of Teachers yesterday warned that the check would condemn tens of thousands of youngsters to failure at too young an age. They highlighted low pass rates of trial tests in which two-thirds of youngsters failed. Delegates at the NUT conference passed a motion threatening to boycott the tests if they are used to create league tables of schools.
The government says it has no plans to use the results in league tables, requiring instead that teachers report the results to parents.
It insisted the test was necessary to drive up poor reading standards by revealing which children are falling behind. The test requires youngsters to read aloud 20 words and 20 "nonsense" words — such as koob and zort.
Jennie Harper, a teacher from Croydon, south London, said: "It is a true reflection of the testing culture we are now in that we are now testing nonsense. I didn't come into teaching to label my class as failures. They are going to be described as failures by a government that doesn't care about abusing or upsetting small children in the name of testing."
