Look back in anger: how Tony Blair betrayed a generation of pupils

In 1997 the Prime Minister made education his priority. Ten years on, his promises lie in tatters: Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth sift through a decade of political failure in which things got worse for poorer children and spin replaced reform Let us take the man at his word. 'We should start saying what we do mean,' Tony Blair told his party in 1994. New Labour should promise only what it was sure it could deliver. And at the heart of those promises was education, education, education. 'I would like,' he said six months before his election, `to be able to look back and recognise that in the late 1990s my Labour government began the process of establishing the creative, vibrant, successful education service our country desperately needs.' Now, as his premiership draws to its close, and as the Blair government sinks deeper into the quagmire of Iraq and cash-for-honours, it is time to hold this audit of practical policy.

What is not in dispute is that the education budget has indeed been increased by 52 per cent. But to what end? The Spectator's analysis of ten years' worth of statistics shows that the value for money has been poor. Such improvements as have been achieved in the nation's schools have not been enough to prevent Britain slipping behind other countries. Schools in the poorest areas have fallen even further into the trough of hopelessness. Meanwhile, the rush to private schools has accelerated with parents who can afford the soaring school fees, and many who can't, taking flight from state failure (one of New Labour's first acts in office was to deprive children from less affluent backgrounds of the opportunity to go to private school by abolishing the Assisted Places Scheme). A study by the OECD last year showed that the only country with a wider exam attainment gap between its state and private sectors is Turkey. Just this week we learned from Ofsted that the number of failing schools in England rose by 17 per cent last term. The increase among primaries was 25 per cent.

All this could not be further from Mr Blair's stated intention when he stormed to power, declaring education to be `the Tories' biggest failure ... and Labour's number one priority'. He had a strategy: during his first term, he'd keep money relatively tight and get primary schools 'sorted'. Then he'd move on to secondaries, with more generous funding. Privately, the Prime Minister confessed that he needed two parliamentary terms, not one, to make a difference. Yet after ten years, halfway through his third term, the progress he promised has conspicuously failed to materialise.

The only indicator which stretches across both Labour and Tory years is GCSE results — and (in spite of clear grade inflation, to which we shall return) it shows that improvement under Labour has been no faster than under the Conservatives. In the last nine years of Tory government, the share of GCSE students with five passes at grade 'C' or above rose from 26 per cent to 45 per cent — up 19 points. In the first nine years of New Labour, it has risen by only 13 points to 58 per cent. The greater autonomy schools have from government control and the comprehensive ethos, the better the results. In selective schools, this pass rate rose to 98.5 per cent last year — no surprise, perhaps, but depressing in the light of New Labour's decision to open no more grammar schools and its legislation to enable them to be closed. The poorer you are, the less well state education will serve you. Among those who qualify for free school meals (by having at least one parent on benefits) the GCSE pass rate is 33 per cent. And amongst those who took English and maths GCSE, this number plummets to 20 per cent.

For a while, there was a measure of progress in the primary sector. The portion of classes with more than 30 children has halved to 11 per cent and the introduction of a literacy and numeracy hour led to higher results in both. 'These had not moved for 50 years in Britain, and we took them to a new level,' says one former Blair adviser. The failure rate for sevento 11year-olds in Key Stage Two tests dropped from 37 per cent to 25 per cent in English and from 31 per cent to 13 per cent in science. But the same Blair adviser accepts that progress has almost ground to a halt since 2001.

If one is seeking a narrative lurking within the national averages, it is of the rich doing better and the poor doing worse. At Key Stage Two, the failure rate is twice as high in both English and maths for pupils who qualify for free school meals. Poor children are falling further behind in English and maths at the primary stage. Last year some 75,000 children finished their 11 years of compulsory education having failed to achieve five GCSEs at any grade. A government explicitly devoted to lifting the horizons of such pupils has failed them utterly. For these children, Mr Blair's bequest is the Asbo, not the A-level.

As the tax burden in Britain pulls ahead of Germany's, we are entitled to ask where all the money spent on secondary schools has gone. The average class size is 22 — the same as it was in 1980, when many of today's parents were still at school themselves. While the pupils per teacher ratio in the private sector has fallen from 11 to 9.3, it has remained marooned at 17 in state secondaries throughout the Labour years. There have been stunts a-plenty, of course: what Mr Blair would call 'eye-catching initiatives'. One such is the 'interactive whiteboard', where children can point to a computer image and move images around on a screen. Yet a government-sponsored study by London's Institute of Education shows these gadgets do more to distract than to educate children. The only question the device has answered is 'How can we waste £50 million?'

For the state schools which perform well, demand is overwhelming. Last month the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors found that being in a good catchment area adds an average £16,000 to a property price — a premium rising to £24,000 in London. But even this is a gamble: as schools become more popular, their catchment areas narrow risibly, to 110 metres in the case of one east London primary. Parents hoping to send their children to Tetherdown primary in Muswell Hill are turned down if they live further than 250 metres from the school gate.

When Labour came to power, 30 per cent of pupils scored at least two As at Alevel and 45 per cent secured good GCSEs. Today these figures stand at 34 per cent and 58 per cent — but these increases are not taken at face value either by universities or employers. The phenomenon of grade inflation, furiously denied by ministers, has been verified in academic studies. Durham University found that a student who scored a 'D' at A-level maths in 1988 would achieve an 'A today.

This ludicrous consequence is that bright children have to take ever more examinations to distinguish themselves. When Labour came to power, there were just 67 children taking 14 or more GCSEs. But today, 18,000 children have followed this course. Of this year's 332,000 pupils, half are taking more than ten exams. The number achieving six or more A-levels has also trebled to 237. It is not teenagers who are stupid. It is ministers.

As New Labour tinkers and spins, preserving the comprehensive doctrine that all must have prizes, our economic competitors are forging ahead. South Korea now leads the world in the share of those aged 25-35 with the equivalent of a school-leaving certificate. Britain is placed 23rd in an OECD league table of 30 entrants — lagging behind Japan, Greece, Ireland, New Zealand and Hungary. We are the only country in the developed world to have dropped out of the top 15.

In healthcare, Mr Blair is fond of pointing out that a drop in demand for private services means that the public sector is improving. He must, therefore, accept that the converse is true for education. Today 13 per cent of pupils are educated privately — up from 11.6 per cent when Blair came to office. The Halifax calculates that average fees now stand at £10,400, an increase of 40 per cent in the last five years. The system is conspiring on every front to encourage, not reduce, social segregation. A survey by the Sutton Trust, an organisation that works to challenge educational inequality, found that in the top 200 comprehensives only 5.6 per cent of pupils are eligible for free school meals: the national average is 14.3 per cent. So much for `the many, not the few'.

Meanwhile the 160 remaining grammar schools are pulling even further ahead of comprehensives. Cambridge University's intake from the private sector has dropped from 1,320 to 1,159 over the last six years. Yet the intake from grammar schools has increased from 207 to 358. In the October before last, comprehensive-school pupils accounted for just 22 per cent of Cambridge's intake. Yet those involved in the admissions process say this is not due to any lack of will on Cambridge's part — it is simply a reflection of reality. 'The calibre of students has increased but the skill set has declined,' says Richard Partington, director of admissions at Sidney Sussex. He estimates that one in four arts students arriving as freshmen at the ancient university can't write in full sentences. To address this, he has banned such undergraduates from using commas when they first arrive.

New Labour acts as if Oxford and Cambridge were bastions of privilege determined to keep out state-school pupils. Oxford, remembering the Laura Spence row, is particularly nervous about what nightmares Prime Minister Brown has planned for the dreaming spires. Yet it is all too easily forgotten that there was a time when Oxford took 62 per cent of its pupils from state schools without any threats or badgering by central government. This was in 1969, when grammar schools acted as a reliable ladder of social mobility. The tripartite system of Butler's 1944 Education Act with grammars, secondary moderns and technical schools may have led to injustices, as John Prescott loses no opportunity to remind us. But it encouraged social desegregation much more effectively than the ham-fisted social engineering of the post-Crosland comprehensive system.

The essence of Mr Blair's claim to office was that things would get better. Astonishingly, some aspects of education policy seem now to be going in reverse. Last year, a study in the British Journal of Educational Psychology showed that today's 11-year-olds are some three years behind their counterparts in 1976 — a devastating indictment of today's system. Professor Michael Shayler, who conducted the research, was stunned to find a regression. 'But the figures just don't lie,' he said. 'We had a sample of over 10,000 children and the results have been checked, rechecked and peer-reviewed.' The tests were of basic intelligence: putting things in order, plotting a graph. All this poses a no less basic question: how ready for globalisation is Britain if its 11-year-olds are stumped by such tests?

What went wrong? Not the original diagnosis, but political will. Mr Blair understood well enough that the solution was to loosen the grasp of the town hall, fund schools directly, radically increase diversity of provision and make parental choice meaningful. But by the autumn of 2005 his political capital had been exhausted, and he was forced to water down his last, already weakened legislative package on schools to assuage Labour rebels. All his hopes now rest with 47 semi-autonomous City Academies, which have improved results where they have been created. 'But there are so few of these academies that the whole agenda can be killed at any minute, as Tony well knows,' says another former No. 10 adviser.

So the future, alas, looks little brighter. Gordon Brown recently declared that education was his 'passion'. While Mr Blair's priorities were 'education, education, education', the Chancellor says that his will be 'excellence, excellence, excellence'. Yet the only idea that he has unveiled to date is that more money should be spent until state-school funding matches that spent on private schools. The Chancellor's model is Sure Start, a network of 700 expensive nurseries which have seen disappointing results in studies so far. Yet there will be 3,500 of them by the end of the decade. Their performance may be wanting, but they embody what appears to be the Chancellor's core belief: that more money is the main answer to better public services. As a product of the Scottish education system — a hothouse state school — it is unlikely that Mr Brown truly appreciates how bad things have got south of the border.

Outside Britain, educational techniques are developing, educational inequality is narrowing and rival economies are advancing as a result. A generation of British children has been betrayed while ministers have preened themselves. Three weeks ago, The Spectator said, 'Mr Blair's inability to turn rhetoric into classroom reality has been his greatest failure, much more damaging to the long-term national interest than any blunders he might have made in Iraq.' That verdict was judged harsh by senior members of the government. Alas for the pupils whom Mr Blair has failed and the economic prospects of this country, it is a verdict that we stick by.

Next week: what is to be done?