The traditions of sitting unseen exam papers and whole-class teaching are being made irrelevant by the information revolution, says the chief executive of the Scottish Council for Educational Technology.

Nigel Paine said the classroom of the future would see children doing more work individually and in small groups, as technological advances filtered through into schools.

And he criticised the current exam system for encouraging children to learn large amounts of information over the short term.

Nigel Paine: "We need to test more than memory"

"I have seen my own children shed knowledge after coming out of the exam room," he told an audience at the British Education and Training Technology exhibition (BETT '99) in London.

"How many times have we heard children leaving exams say: 'I won't need to know that again'?"

He illustrated his arguments by using a survey, conducted in 1986 and repeated in 1997, which asked people to say how much of the knowledge that they needed to do their jobs was stored in their minds.

Mr Paine said that the survey showed how the workplace had changed, so that people depended more on technology such as computers and less on memory.

"Yet if someone went to an exam room with their database, they would not be allowed to use it," said Mr Paine.

In an interview following his speech, Mr Paine said that while there would be a place for some whole-class teaching in the classroom of the future, the government was placing far too much emphasis on it.

And he reinforced his criticism of the current exam system. "Assessment is the last unreformed area of education," he told BBC News Online. "We need to test more than memory."