THE government’s £1 billion campaign to raise literacy and numeracy standards in primary schools has failed to have any impact on GCSE results, according to Labour’s favourite think tank.

An analysis by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) shows that despite children achieving much better results at the age of 11, they have failed to go on to produce better GCSE results at 16.

The findings, delivered at a private Whitehall seminar hosted by the IPPR earlier this month, will alarm Tony Blair, who promised in 1998 that Labour’s mission was to produce a “world class” education system. It suggests that the vast sums of extra investment being pumped into Britain’s schools are being wasted.

The think tank’s figures show literacy test scores for 11- year-olds jumped 18 percentage points between 1996 and 2004. But when the same children came to take their GCSEs five years later, their results improved by only four points — a rise no greater than would be predicted by long-term trends.

Some experts say the fall-off exposes the poor standards in many of the country’s secondary schools. Others say the national test results at 11 are flawed, and have exaggerated the improvements claimed for primary schools by ministers.

Either way, the government’s critics are likely to argue that the national literacy and numeracy strategy is not working.

In 1997, Sir Michael Barber, the most senior adviser in the education department, said a major social transformation would be achieved by ensuring children left primary school with the basic skills to benefit from secondary education.

He described the national literacy and numeracy strategy as the “largest educational initiative on the planet”. Government accounts show that since it was started, it has cost more than £1 billion.

However, Peter Robinson, senior economist at the IPPR, bluntly told the education officials at the seminar that the apparent improvement in test scores in primary schools had not been matched by a similar rise in GCSE results.

“We had that huge surge in attainment by 11-year-olds, yet five years later when they took their GCSEs the rate of improvement trundled along as before,” he said.

David Hopkins, who until last month was the senior adviser to Ruth Kelly, the education secretary, told a recent conference in Brighton: “New Labour has been quite good at dealing with failing schools. What it hasn’t been good at is dealing with the amount of under-performance and complacency inside the system.”

He has identified 600 secondary schools — one in five — as under-performing.

A consultant who has worked with the government on literacy projects but who did not want to be identified, said: “Shedloads of money was pushed into primary schools and they got results. But the government hasn’t been radical when it comes to secondary schools. They haven’t dared introduce proper performance-related pay for teachers or do anything about the structure of schools.”

Others believe the problem may be deeper. Independent tests by Peter Tymms, professor of education at Durham University, found there had been some improvement in primary children’s reading standards but nothing like the 18 percentage point rise claimed by the government.

Kelly has refused to accept Tymms’s claims, even though they have been largely endorsed by the independent Statistics Commission, the ultimate arbiter on government data.

At the seminar a senior official from the Department for Education and Skills, who cannot be identified because speakers were guaranteed anonymity, conceded: “It is undeniable that the rate of increase in attainment (by primary schoolchildren) has not been matched by the same rate of increase in attainment in GCSEs.”

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