The more abject the failure in delivery, the more grandiose the promise of cake to come. In 1997 we were told that underperforming state schools were to be transformed into “a world-class education system”. The truth 10 years on is that some schools achieve wonderful results, in spite of rather than because of state interference, but that across the system standards are too low and are getting worse.

National curriculum test results show that progress in improving basic literacy and numeracy has stalled: 20% of 11-year-olds leave primary school unable to deal with the demands of the secondary school curriculum. More than half of 16-year-olds fail to achieve five good GCSEs including English and maths. And we are going backwards in international studies of educational performance: seventh in reading, fourth in science and eighth in maths in 2001: now we have slid to 17th, 14th and 24th respectively.

Neither are the problems limited to poor academic achievement. Children growing up in the UK are, according to a recent United Nations report, the worst off in the world. They are more likely to grow up in poverty and bad health, to have poor relationships with their parents, to take drugs and binge drink, and to have unsafe sex than children in any other wealthy country. Experts in childhood have taken to writing to the papers to express their concern, blaming the media, big business and, many argue, the way in which the government’s attempts to drive up standards in schools have caused many children intolerable stress.

Well, the government at least has listened and is about to raise its game. No longer are schools the focus of its attention. Now it is you and me, every parent in the land and all our children. Ed Balls, the schools secretary, has published his Children’s Plan and he is going to make England “the best place in the world for children to grow up”. Nothing less. Child poverty is to be eradicated.

“Expert parenting advisers” are to be appointed to every local authority to help us when we need some expert parenting advice. A “play strategy”, coupled with £225m investment in new playgrounds, will ensure that our children no longer slump, pasty faced and obese, in front of their televisions and computer screens. A report is to be commissioned into the commercialisation of childhood. A Youth Alcohol Action Plan is to be published alongside a Drugs Strategy to “tackle parental alcohol misuse” which - put down that glass of wine - “can influence young people’s own consumption”. “Best practice” in “effective sex and relationships education” is to be reviewed. Oh, and £160m is to be spent over the next two years “to improve the quality and range of places for young people to go and things for them to do”.

No stone is to be left unturned. There is a plan for this and a strategy for that. Advisers are to be appointed and targets set. By 2020 “all young people” will be “participating in positive activities to develop personal and social skills”, employers will be falling over themselves to recruit literate and numerate school leavers who turn up to work on time, and children generally will have had their “wellbeing enhanced”, whatever that might mean. The man from the manse has transformed his party into a millennial religious sect. Vote Labour and enter the promised land where everyone succeeds and everyone is happy thanks to the munificence and wisdom of the state.

What, though, of schools? What, though, of the admittedly inconvenient fact that a good number of our children are not, 10 years into this wise and munificent administration, actually learning very much?

Well, as ever, the rhetoric is riveting, the aspiration cosmic. “Every school”, thunders Balls sitting in his Whitehall office, must be “uncompromising in its ambitions”. The detail is less impressive. It is designed in fact to undermine any vestige of real educational expectation and will without doubt result in a further embarrassing slide down the international league tables.

Consider: “The best way to achieve world-class standards is a system in which all children receive teaching tailored to their needs and which is based on ‘stage not age’.” In one, very obvious, sense this is true. Teachers need to know what their children have understood and what they have not understood. Some children make quicker progress than others. The implication here, however, is that children should progress at their own pace, and, in particular, that the current tests which all children sit at 7, 11 and 14 should be replaced by a new system in which children are assessed when their teachers judge they are ready to be assessed.

Children need a challenge. They need to be motivated, inspired, convinced, and, if necessary, cajoled into the belief that they can do more than they thought they could do. You cannot personalise the learning of the eight times table or a French verb. The intellectual challenge is there and it has to be met. Self-esteem, moreover, comes from achievement: the problems identified by the UN research might be solved if we taught our children more and pandered to them less.

How, moreover, are problems in state schools ever to be solved if we do not know how individual state schools are performing? The abolition of national tests which are sat by every child in the country at the same time will return us to the situation we were in before the Education Reform Act, when nobody had the faintest idea what was going on in our primary schools.

This, of course, is what the teacher unions have long wanted.

They have always, for very obvious reasons, hated the spotlight of accountability. So, too, it seems, now that its programme of reform has run into the sand does the government. If everyone is in the dark, nobody can complain and, come the next election, nobody will know what to think.

What is clear is that the “root and branch review” of the primary school curriculum which the plan announces is a cynical attempt to be all things to all men. Basic skills? Of course, more time must be found. Social and emotional skills? Crucially important, they will be fitted in, too. Play-based learning? Wonderful. A modern foreign language? An excellent idea. We might not have any competent teachers, but, yes, we will make the space.

There is no guiding belief, no understanding that what matters is what parents who can afford prep school fees are buying: rigorous teaching in traditional subjects. Indeed, the catch word now seems to be “flexibility”, and the talk is of abandoning separate subject teaching in favour of a woolly “thematic” approach in which subjects like history and geography are rolled together.

But, then, this government never has understood what education ought to involve and what parents want for their children. That is why it has made so little progress, and why now, conscious that they are in a hole, ministers have decided to climb out and dig a few more. They hope, presumably, that we will applaud the effort and ignore the futility of it all.

Less stress, more play and more care - how Labour aims to build a better future for children

The rise in mothers, as well as fathers, chasing “rewarding careers” is one of the key drivers for the new Children’s Plan, a bureaucratic blueprint touching on nearly every area of our children’s lives over the next 10 years, writes Sian Griffiths.

In the face of long working hours, more women working than in any EU country bar Denmark and Sweden and sky-high divorce rates, the schools secretary, Ed Balls, admitted last week that parents had difficulties “balancing work and family life”. The 169-page plan is an implicit acknowledgement that there is much wrong with many children’s lives in Britain today.

So what are the solutions the government offers? Firstly, nurseries and schools are to step in for mothers and fathers for more of the day. Ministers hope that extending the reach of institutional care will give children from poorer families access to the toys, books and attention middle-class children have long taken for granted and help close the social class divide in academic achievement.

Although Balls insisted last week that his proposals did not amount to “nanny state intervention” many will be horrified at the proposal that 20,000 two-year-olds in poor areas will be offered free places in nurseries, some open from 8am to 6pm, over the next three years.

The toddlers would be entitled to 15 hours free daycare a week. Cost to the taxpayer? £100m. Yet experts have warned that institutional care at too young an age can make children more anxious and aggressive. Ministers already offer 12.5 hours a week of free daycare to all three and four-year-olds.

In a similar vein, schools, many also due to open from 8am to 6pm, are to become community centres frequented by police, parenting experts (two expert parenting advisers per local authority), child psychologists and social workers as well as teachers.

The links between school and home are to be ratcheted up with every family getting a “red book” on each child, tracking progress from 5 to 18, as well as e-mail updates from teachers.

More than 500 children and 2,500 adults were quizzed for their views before the plan was drawn up. High on their list of concerns was the loss of freedom for children to roam safely outdoors and the risks posed by traffic. The government’s answer? More playgrounds, even for teenagers.

- Thirty adventure playgrounds with climbing frames and assault courses are to be created for 8 to 13-year-olds in a bid to cut rising obesity levels; 3,500 more will be revamped. Cost? £225m.

- By 2008 a play strategy will spell out how 4,000 new play workers will be deployed and to make the streets safer for children there will be more 20mph zones.

Even as Britain topples down international league tables for reading, maths, and science, Balls has come up with proposals to boost the quality of both Britain’s teachers and nursery staff.

- Summer-born children, who often do worse in exams because they are nearly a year younger than some of their classmates, may be offered staggered school starting dates and extra teaching.

- Teachers will be expected to train for a masters degree and each nursery will be led by a graduate by 2015 (two in poorer areas). It will become easier to strike off poor teachers: the government education adviser Sir Cyril Taylor claimed earlier this year that there were 17,000 incompetents.

- Following criticism that national testing is stressful, “key stage” tests at 7, 11 and 14 could be scrapped from 2009. Instead children would sit exams when they were ready. The move could spell the end for test-based league tables, which allow parents to compare schools’ performances.

However, it was reported last week that a pilot of the new testing regime is struggling: one in seven pilot schools have pulled out because it takes too much teachers’ time.

- For badly behaved youngsters plans to pilot from next April “restorative justice” approaches led to tabloid headlines such as “Let off for teenage thugs who say sorry”. A pilot for 10 to 17-year-olds will bring them face to face with their victims and could see offenders being fostered instead of sent to custody. There will be “studios” for children expelled from school, located close to businesses so they can learn work-related skills.

The following were also kickstarted by the plan:

- A review of the primary curriculum to be led by Jim Rose, the man behind the new drive to teach reading via phonics. Rose will look at ways of giving more time in the school day for the three Rs and a compulsory foreign language. There will be money to develop children’s writing via personal coaching.

- A review of the impact of advertising on children’s wellbeing and another of the quality of mental health services for children.

- A new youth alcohol action plan and a new drugs strategy by 2008.

- A review of how sex education is taught in schools: Britain has the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Europe.

Best schools

Go to timesonline.co.uk/parentpower for the full 2007 Sunday Times survey of Britain’s best state and independent schools. Find all the top secondary, primary and preparatory schools in your area simply by typing your postcode into our online database. You can also search by school name, town, region and education authority.

As well as displaying all the recent exam results for each school there are links on Parent Power to take you straight to the latest inspection report and the school website.

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