Leading Article: An hour of danger for Mr Blunkett's scheme

SOMETHING FUNNY happened on the road to the manifesto. When Tony Blair was a candidate for the Labour leadership, one of the distinctions between him and his main challenger, John Prescott, was that Mr Prescott wanted to set a target for unemployment and Mr Blair did not. But Mr Blair's Government now has targets for all sorts of things, some of them more sensible than others. It has targets for waiting lists and class sizes, which are distorting priorities in health and education, but it also has targets for raising the standards of literacy and numeracy achieved in primary schools, which are valuable engines of improvement in the education system.

Chris Woodhead, the chief inspector of schools, thinks that the target for English is silly and that schools will simply cheat to achieve it. But the target for maths is harder to bend: either you know what eight times seven is or, like Stephen Byers, twice promoted since he was minister for school standards, you do not.

It was, therefore, foolhardy of David Blunkett to tie his job as Education Secretary to hitting these targets. Foolhardy because achieving them depends on many factors outside Government control, but admirable nevertheless.

Mr Blunkett's plans for maths announced today, with a "numeracy hour" to match the daily "literacy hour", merit a cautious welcome. They represent a sound balance between the traditional and the trendy - mental arithmetic rather than calculators, and whole-class teaching, with its assumption that all children can keep up. However, both "hours" are too prescriptive, with what should be taught, and when, set out in voluminous detail. It is as if Mr Blunkett is personally trying to achieve his targets by remote control, hardly the best way to motivate teachers. An educational pendulum is again in danger of swinging too far.