Children being robbed of their innocence by 'guns, gangs and celebrities'

The bleak picture was based on interviews with hundreds of parents, headmasters, employers and primary school pupils.

The consensus view was that youngsters were being forced to grow up too soon and faced a perilous future.

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The report - drawn up by academics from Cambridge University - also warns that childhood is under threat from the damaging influences of marketing and computer games.

Teachers questioned for the study warned that mothers who put their careers ahead of parenting were fuelling the problem.

Children themselves voiced anxieties about strangers, burglars, gang violence, knives and guns.

The participants said the culture of respect was disappearing and that the world outside the school gates was becoming increasingly dangerous.

The middle-class parents surveyed admitted they were partly to blame for rising exam stress by paying for tutors to get their children into selective schools.

Concerns were also voiced over the consequences of immigration and how it had brought 'rapid change' to communities.

The inquiry, headed by Robin Alexander, a professor of education, was set up last year to report on primary schooling.

Researchers conducted 87 in-depth discussion sessions around the country.

Professor Alexander said he had wanted to go beyond the ideas of metropolitan commentators and tap into grassroots opinion.

While participants aired strong views on the state of education, the common theme running through the sessions was 'childhood innocence lost', he said.

Many participants - including most teachers and some parents and children - believed the Government's regime of national curriculum tests was imposing too great a burden on youngsters.

This put them under 'intense and perhaps excessive pressure' at too young an age.

But schools for many children were also refuges from troubling influences in the outside world, the report said.

Headmasters and teachers deplored children's exposure to unsuitable influences via television, the internet, mobile phones and computer games.

They also told researchers they disliked our 'national obsession with celebrity' and the media's elevation of 'inappropriate role models'.

The rise of computers had meant, in the words of one teacher, 'less speaking and listening'.

Children voiced worries about terrorism as well as climate change and poverty.

But the report added: "The children were no less anxious about those local issues which directly affected their sense of security - traffic, the lack of safe play areas, rubbish, graffiti, gangs of older children, knives, guns."

Inner-city children were especially fearful of strangers, burglars and street violence.

Many heads, teachers and classroom assistants did not have a high opinion of parents, the study found.

Teachers were critical of mothers who put career or income before parenting as well as those who failed to value education.

Professor Alexander said the interviews, summarised in today's interim report Community Soundings, revealed a striking consensus.

"The unease about the present and pessimism about the future which we uncovered . . . cannot be so easily explained away," he added.

There were also concerns the primary school lessons were too narrow and rigid and that testing was compromising education.

The final results of the inquiry, the first independent review of primary education for 40 years, will be published next year.

Michael Gove, Tory children's spokesman, said the report highlighted the need for urgent action to tackle a broken society.

"Gordon Brown refuses to acknowledge that there is a problem but this research confirms that his view is simply at odds with the experiences of the public," he said.

"The very fact that the Government won't accept there is a problem means they will never be able to do anything to resolve it."

A spokesman for the Department for Children said: "We are committed to improving the lives of children and young people right across the country and we are making substantial progress. The Government does not share the view that children are over-tested.'

A damning study by Unicef last year claimed British children were the unhappiest in Europe.

It put much of the blame on the breakdown of family life.