Gap between best and worst secondary schools 'is growing'

The gap between the best-performing secondary schools and the worst-performing is growing, Mike Tomlinson, a former chief schools inspector, said last night.

Rising GCSE and A-level pass rates had masked the 30,000 children who failed exams every year, about one in 20, he told the North of England education conference in Warrington. A further 10,000 aged 14 to 16 quit school every year and slipped into the black economy or on to the streets.

Despite improvements in teaching standards and a narrowing of the gap in primary school performance, Britain still did not have the world-class education system desired by Tony Blair, said Mr Tomlinson.

Critics of the Government's education policy claim its plan to increase the number of specialist secondary schools might create a two-tier education system under which those who lack extra funding or specialise in a particular subject will lag behind.

Mr Tomlinson said international research showed standards had improved to place the UK fifth, eighth and fourth respectively out of 32 Western nations in tests for 15-year-olds in English, maths and science. A decade earlier, 13-year-olds in England were nearly two years behind those in Japan and a year behind those in the Netherlands, France and Belgium in maths.

But figures also showed one in four of those aged 16 to 18 had dropped out of full-time education and training, "significantly above the OECD [(Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] and European Union averages". He went on: "So have we finally secured a world-class, world-beating education service? No, not yet. All of this evidence suggests we have many schools and young people underachieving, notably at secondary level. Everyone agrees that a high proportion of [these] schools are in inner- city and urban settings.

"It is also clear that underachieving students include many from our African-Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, children in public care, traveller pupils, white boys and pupils with special needs."

Mr Tomlinson said ministers should stop the stream of government initiatives with their "bureaucratic demands" and encourage schools to innovate and take risks to raise standards. "Not only should there be no new initiatives of an isolated kind, but also the present ones should be consolidated," he said. "This is needed to reduce the bureaucratic demands, where each has its own accounting requirements, targets and time-lines."

The latest example of a badly planned initiative, he said, was a scheme to give schools leadership incentive grants, aimed at improving the standard of headteachers. It was sent to education authorities on 20 December, when schools had closed for the Christmas break, demanding that they consult their heads over the grants and reply by 8 January, the first day of the new term in many schools.

Meanwhile, Damian Green, the shadow Education Secretary, will tell the conference tomorrow of plans to bring back grant-maintained schools if the Conservatives are elected. All schools reaching agreed standards would be given the right to opt out of council control and run their own affairs with the aid of a grant from Whitehall. The move means the Tories have ditched proposals to abolish local education authorities.