The former Ofsted chief, Chris Woodhead, has issued a stinging attack on the government accusing Labour of failing to deliver on education.

In his first article for The Telegraph, Woodhead blamed the education secretary, David Blunkett, for lacking conviction and courage and accused Tony Blair of being "incapable of seeing anything through".

David Blunkett has rejected Woodhead's outburst, saying his views were "utterly misguided". "I haven't transformed the education service yet in the way I would wish, but I have laid the foundations and I'm very sorry indeed that Chris has chosen to abuse us in this way," he said.

Woodhead, who resigned last year following a series of rows with the government, claimed Labour had betrayed a generation of children by failing to deliver the radical transformation of education that it promised.

He claimed the education of the nation's pupils is being distorted by a misguided emphasis on utilitarian "skills" which is undermining the national curriculum and destroying the substance of classroom lessons.

Woodhead issued an attack on the prime minister saying: "I smile whenever I read that the most feared words in Whitehall are: 'Tony wants'. In my experience, there is an inverse correlation between what Tony wants and what Tony gets."

He claims Blunkett "has presided over a set of initiatives that has wasted taxpayers' money, distracted teachers from their real responsibilities and encapsulated the worst of the discredited ideology that has done so much damage since the 1960s".

Woodhead claims his final fall-out with the government came at a Standards Task Force meeting where experts discussed whether teachers ought to be renamed "learning professionals".