Scott Barnes is in year nine of Mark Rutherford Upper School in Bedford. He is 14 and about to choose what optional subjects to take at GCSE. He doesn't have much choice: he has to take English literature, English language, maths, at least one science, design and technology and a foreign language.

Scott wants to be a long-distance lorry driver. He has grown up loving cars and engines. He wants to leave school as soon as he can and go to college to study engineering and mechanics. The only academic subject on his current curriculum that he thinks will really help him is geography. "It will help me to read maps when I'm a lorry driver," he explains.

Scott would really like to be able to study vehicle mechanics and engineering for at least some of the time during school hours. But if he doesn't get a clutch of decent GCSE grades his school won't hit government targets for examination performance. So his teachers don't have much choice but to continue with a curriculum that is manifestly not best suited to Scott.

Ian Andrews, deputy head of Mark Rutherford Upper, a typical urban comprehensive, estimates that about one-third of his pupils would do better if they did not have to follow exam courses in so many National Curriculum subjects. The students he is talking about want hands-on courses with minimal writing content. "We would help their motivation and self-esteem if we could improve their lot at school. If you engage and motivate, your discipline problems disappear," he says.

He believes there is a close correlation between the rise in exclusions of pupils from schools nationally and the introduction of the National Curriculum. He thinks that if teachers did not have to do battle with pupils who don't want to be there, the students who do want to be in academic classes would benefit.

Currently, a group of about half-a-dozen disaffected Year 11 students, 15- and 16-year-olds in their GCSE year, are sent part-time to Bedford College, a Further Education college, to follow work-related courses. The scheme works well. Ian Andrews would like it to be available to younger boys.

Kate Townesend, head of year nine at Mark Rutherford, says that although the breadth offered by the National Curriculum is good, she would like it to be more flexible in its later stages so that students could drop subjects that are now mandatory to 16. "When you get to year nine, you have done nine years of the National Curriculum. You have all that knowledge and there are some subjects you might really want to do more of. I have students who would really like to drop design and technology but they have to do it," she says.

About half of Mark Rutherford's 1,100 pupils get at least five "good" GCSEs – grades A-C. There are perhaps only about 10 of its 280 year-nine pupils who might say they hate school.

Scott isn't one of them. He likes PE and sport, and is good at cross-country running. He enjoys doing experiments in science. He is not unmotivated. He is just motivated by the things that turn him on. In his spare time he helps out at a scrapyard and has already re-wired a burnt-out van. "I traced all the wires back and fixed them all up," he says. "When I plugged it in and it worked I felt good. I didn't think I could do it but I could."

Could a new-style 14-plus school curriculum plug the Scotts of this world into education?