TONY BLAIR’S principal claim to success in improving school standards was undermined yesterday by a devastating report from Ofsted.

Almost half of boys and a third of girls continue to leave primary school unable to write properly, nearly seven years after the Government introduced the national literacy strategy. Ofsted blamed poor teaching and said that one in three English lessons were no better than satisfactory. A third of mathematics classes were just as weak, despite the introduction of the numeracy strategy in 1999.

The findings came as Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, faces a bitter split with the teaching profession today by ditching a radical reform of secondary school qualifications recommended by a government inquiry. Ms Kelly will reject plans to replace GCSEs and A levels with a new diploma drawn up by Sir Mike Tomlinson as a means of boosting achievement and staying-on rates. Charles Clarke, her predecessor as Education Secretary, appointed Sir Mike in 2002 to develop a blueprint for transforming secondary education.

Ms Kelly will insist, however, on retaining the “gold standard” of A levels and GCSEs, while promising to boost the standing of vocational qualifications.

Sir Mike, the former head of Ofsted, said that he would be very upset if the Government left the present structure essentially unchanged. A levels were now “strangling both teacher and student scholarship”.

Ofsted’s review of the literacy and numeracy strategies in primary schools made clear that huge numbers of children continue to enter secondary education ill-equipped to cope with the demands of the curriculum. Ministers have made much of the improvements in literacy and numeracy since 1997. The proportion of 11-year-olds achieving level four, the expected standard, in national curriculum English tests rose to 78 per cent last year from 75 per cent in 2003, the first rise since 2000.

Maths results improved by one percentage point to 74 per cent.

However, the English result masked a 20 percentage point gap in achievement in reading and writing. The expected standard in reading was met by 83 per cent of pupils last year, but only 63 per cent managed it in writing. Just 56 per cent of boys passed the writing test, compared with 71 per cent of girls. As a result, one in three pupils enters secondary school without the writing ability considered necessary to cope with the curriculum. Only 14 per cent of children who fail to reach the expected standards at 11 go on to pass five good GCSEs at 16.

Ofsted concluded that a lack of subject knowledge among a significant minority of teachers was a key failing in primary schools and said that the problems were serious enough to prevent further improvements in standards. “Teaching of this quality, while having no significant weaknesses, is not effective enough to improve the quality of pupils’ learning and what they know, understand and can do,” it said.

David Bell, the Chief Inspector of Schools in England, said: “There are still schools where children are not receiving the daily diet of good teaching that they need in order to raise achievement further.”

Tim Collins, the Shadow Education Secretary, said: “The fact that at least one in three primary pupils go on to their senior school without being able to write properly is one of the single biggest failings of eight years of Labour government. Ruth Kelly and her predecessors have managed to get so hung up on their departmental target culture that they have lost sight of the underlying problem of classroom literacy and numeracy.”

The Government sought to boost achievement in schools by merging the two strategies last year into a broader “primary national strategy”. Ofsted found that this was having little impact because few schools had embraced the change.

Times recommends

• Students to rate lecturers online
• Students face big rise in university fees
• Queen’s English Society boss’s poor spelling