Nine years after promising to make “education, education, education” his top priority, Tony Blair has received a damning end-of-term report in what is likely to be the last Ofsted annual assessment of his premiership.

In its annual report for 1997-98, covering the first full year of Mr Blair’s tenure, Ofsted concluded that one in ten secondary schools was substantially underachieving and bemoaned the “unacceptably wide gap between good and bad schools”. This year Ofsted judges one in eight secondaries to be inadequate and expresses concern about the “gap between the best and worst”. It is hardly a ringing endorsement of nine years of Labour government.

This is despite record investment in schools, up from £2,970 per pupil in 1997 to £4,490 this year.

The introduction of a new inspection regime in the past year, which has raised the bar for all schools and made it more difficult for schools to gain a “good” or “outstanding” rating, makes direct comparisons with previous annual reports difficult. Overall, however, Christine Gilbert, the new chief inspector of schools, is convinced that standards are rising, thanks in large part to the efforts of teaching and support staff.

International comparisons show that pupils in England can increasingly hold their own alongside their peers in the developed world. Successive years of record GCSE and A-level results suggest that standards are rising, particularly at the top.

Ms Gilbert’s concern, however, is with the pace of change and the lack of progress among the most deprived and vulnerable children, especially children in care. More specifically, the report highlights the alarming gap between the performance of secondary and primary schools. Ofsted judged 13 per cent of secondary schools to be “inadequate”, compared with 7 per cent of primaries.

So, what are the answers? Ms Gilbert believes that personalised learning, with individual lesson plans, assessments and targets for each pupil, is the way forward. She also singles out poor leadership as one key reason for school failure, adding that she could not remember reading a report on a school in special measures, Ofsted’s lowest category, where leadership was judged good.

Her idea of using senior personnel from business and industry to tackle the shortage of good head teachers is an interesting one. While some teaching staff may object, the notion has the tentative backing of the influential Association of School and College Leaders as well as some high-flying heads themselves.

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