The Prime Minister said yesterday that the ultimate goal of his policies was to “escape the straitjacket of the traditional comprehensive school”. Instead there would be “genuinely independent non-feepaying state schools” that responded to the needs of pupils and parents.

Mr Blair said that his reform programme, begun in 1997, would reach its “final state” in a White Paper to be published in the autumn that was intended to transfer power from local authorities to parents and teachers. But he conceded that wealthy parents would always have access to better schools for their children.

Shortly before the 2001 general election Mr Blair told the Association of Teachers and Lecturers that his aim was “to get to the situation where you have a state education system that’s as good in its facilities and investment as the independent sector”.

Yesterday he declared: “I am not naive enough to believe that we will ever achieve a situation where wealth does not matter in schooling. But neither am I defeatist enough to believe we cannot improve what we have.”

Mr Blair was speaking to head teachers and business leaders at the £33 million City of London Academy, in Bermondsey, southeast London, which is sponsored by the Corporation of London.

He pledged to open 200 academies in place of failing comprehensives by 2010, describing them as “independent schools, which are free to parents”. Many of the freedoms enjoyed by academies would be extended to all schools.

Standards in state schools had risen, but improvement had “relied, to a great extent, on central and local government direction”.

“It has tended to shy away from following through the logic of the reforms so far,” Mr Blair said. “The logic of changing to the specialist schools, of starting city academies, of giving greater freedom to schools in who they hire, what they pay, how they run their school day, is very clear.

“It is to escape the straitjacket of the traditional comprehensive school and embrace the idea of genuinely independent non-feepaying state schools.

“It is to break down the barriers to new providers, to schools associating with outside sponsors, to the ability to start and expand schools; and to give parental choice its proper place. This will never mean every parent has the place they want for their child. But it will mean that their preferences start shaping the way the system works.”

Mr Blair rejected criticism of academy sponsors from teachers’ unions and backbench Labour MPs. Companies, charities and millionaires invest £2 million to sponsor each academy and are given control of the governing body in return.

The Government pays the remainder of the building costs, averaging £25 million, and funds the provision of education. Mr Blair said that sponsors were “coming into the schooling system for the same reason that the great philanthropists did in the 19th century” — to give something back.

Mr Blair said that public services existed so that those who could not afford to buy good healthcare or schooling were “not at a disadvantage”. In practice, however, the well-off could continue to buy services.

“Let’s be brutally honest. In schooling the better-off do have choice and power over the system,” he said. “If they are sufficiently wealthy they can send their children to a range of independent, fee-paying schools which, by and large, provide excellent education. They can move house to be next to the best state schools. They can buy private tuition.

“In other words, for the better-off, the education system is full of options. But for a middle or lower-income family, whose local school is underperforming, there is nothing they can do except take what they are given.” Mr Blair himself stirred controversy by sending his sons to the grant-maintained London Oratory School, in Fulham, rather than to a poorly performing local comprehensive in Islington when Labour policy was against grant-maintained status.

www.timesonline.co.uk/education
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