The Commons Education and Skills Select Committee said there was no evidence to support the claim that more money equalled better results.

Its findings overshadowed Ruth Kelly’s debut speech as Education Secretary, at a conference in Manchester, in which she argued that government achievements had been “underpinned by record investment”.

The Labour-dominated committee chastised Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, for saying that “the sustained high investment in education since 1997 has resulted in a measurable improvement in standards”.

It said that GCSE results had improved no more rapidly during Tony Blair’s Government than when the Conservatives were in power under John Major. However, public expenditure on secondary schools had risen up to ten times faster under Labour than under the Tories. “Our evidence showed that with lower levels of investment GCSE results had improved to at least the same extent in earlier periods in the 1990s,” the committee concluded. “The Government needs to take great care in making claims about the effectiveness of increased investment in education in increasing levels of achievement which the evidence cannot be proved to support. Links between expenditure and outcome remain difficult to establish.”

The committee’s report is troubling for a government that has made increased spending on public services a central element of its appeal. The Conservatives have accused Labour of wasting taxpayers’ money and have promised to make savings by spending more efficiently.

Ms Kelly sought to position herself as a “parental champion” of high standards, good discipline and greater choice in schools. But she offered few clues and no policy prescriptions as to how she intended to achieve these ambitions.

She told the North of England Education Conference: “Parents want universal high standards delivered by top-quality teachers.

“Universal high standards require universal good behaviour in schools . . . Parents have a right to send their children to orderly schools but with that goes the responsibility to ensure that their child attends school and behaves well, as well as the responsibility to support the school’s approach to discipline.”

She took it “as a matter of principle that choice should be expanded where we can”. Parents should be offered a greater range of specialist schools and city academies.

The select committee’s report on public expenditure in education said that the Treasury had “simply asserted” a direct link between spending and exam performance in the 2004 Budget, with no supporting evidence.

The proportion of pupils passing five GCSEs at grade C or better had improved by 5 percentage points between 1999 and 2003. Public expenditure had risen by 31.6 per cent in real terms over the same period. But the proportion getting five good passes had risen by 4.4 percentage points in the previous four-year period between 1995 and 1999, while public expenditure had increased by only 3.4 per cent.Schools had recorded the greatest improvement between 1991 and 1995, when the proportion of pupils with five good grades rose by 6.7 percentage points. Public spending in that period grew by 11.4 per cent.

Barry Sheerman, Labour MP for Huddersfield and chairman of the select committee, said that Ms Kelly should “apply a ruthless logic” towards expenditure by asking for evidence of the value obtained by different policies. The committee said its analysis had not disproved a link between higher public spending and better GCSE scores, but that the Government’s justification for higher spending had wider implications for its programme of public-service reform.

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