TONY BLAIR has ordered officials to make it easier and quicker for popular schools to expand after the failure of measures to improve parent power in education.

An Education White Paper this autumn will rewrite the rulebook on school choice after a £37 million school expansion programme that was begun in 2003 resulted in just seven popular schools add extra classes.

Parents will be given new rights to demand sixth-form provision and schools may lose the ability to block the expansion of a successful neighbour even if it threatens their own viability, The Times understands.

A range of other measures is being considered including more direct financial incentives for popular schools and the reform of School Organisation Committees, the local bodies responsible for planning school places.

Successful head teachers will be offered even greater incentives to “expand” their school by taking over a failing school nearby.

Mr Blair is said to be deeply frustrated that his continued pledges of a revolution in parental choice to enable hundreds more pupils to go to their first preference school have come to little.

Speaking at the Labour Party conference in 2002, the Prime Minister said: “Why shouldn’t there be a range of schools for parents to choose from . . . Why shouldn’t good schools expand or take over failing schools or form federations?”

But figures from the Department for Education show that it has so far received just 20 applications for the popular schools expansion programme which came into force two summers ago. Seven have been approved, five rejected and eight are still being considered.

The White Paper expected in October will focus on Labour’s manifesto promise to tailor schooling to the individual needs of every child. But Downing Street has been embarrassed by the actions of Labour councils taking parents to the High Court to stop them sending their children to the school of their choice.

One source said: “School expansion is something we are looking at as we develop the White Paper proposals.

“It is certainly the case that there has been a poor level of expansion over the past two years.

“We need to do more to create the right incentives for a popular school to want to expand as well as making it easier or quicker.”

Good schools will also be encouraged to expand using funding from Labour’s 15-year Building Schools for the Future programme, which aims to refurbish every school.

The ambitious proposals to expand popular schools hit problems not least because many head teachers do not want their schools to get bigger. They fear that this will change one of the qualities of the school that made it popular and successful in the first place.

John Dunford, the general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, said: “Schools see the next phase of development as getting better not getting larger because getting larger can put at risk the progress that you have already made. One of the major tensions in the Government education programme is the greater freedom for individual schools on the one hand and the thrust towards greater collaboration on the other. That will not be made easier by loosening restrictions on expansion.”

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