THE head of Ofsted cast doubt yesterday on the effectiveness of key government programmes for raising standards in schools.

David Bell said that one in four schools continued to offer “nothing better than mediocrity” to their pupils despite an overall decline in levels of outright failure.

Pupils who had fallen behind in English and maths continued to struggle at secondary school despite initiatives costing hundreds of millions of pounds to help them.

Primary schools were ignoring efforts to broaden the curriculum, while a minority of head teachers were actively resisting attempts to improve classroom standards.

Mr Bell gave warning in his annual report for the 2004-05 academic year that “the challenge of dealing with some persistent weaknesses in our education system should not be underestimated”.

A “significant minority” of primary schools had failed to use materials designed to improve teaching standards across the curriculum as part of the Government’s Primary National Strategy.

“Primary schools have been reluctant to risk losing hard-won improvements in English and mathematics and have missed opportunities to broaden the curriculum by not giving enough emphasis to other subjects,” it said.

Schools with the worst results “lacked a sense of urgency and determination in taking effective action to improve achievement”. Ofsted said: “Overall, schools have not evaluated sharply enough the impact of actions on the achievement of all pupils.”

Many schools gave their most able children extra work to do “rather than matching the curriculum more closely to their needs and providing sufficiently challenging teaching”.

Pupils in greatest need of help were “too frequently” left with untrained classroom assistants, while teachers concentrated on the rest of the class.

The Chief Inspector was even harsher on the Key Stage 3 National Strategy, which cost £670 million last year and aims to boost standards in the early years of secondary school.

Catch-up lessons in English and maths for children who had fallen behind were unsatisfactory in a quarter of secondaries and good in only a third. Ofsted said that “well under half of pupils” had caught up with their peers by the age of 14.

Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, announced on Monday that she will spend a further £450 million by 2008 on catch-up tuition, including one-to-one and small group lessons. The Department for Education and Skills has also awarded a £178 million contract to the consultancy firm Capita to advise schools on improving the primary and secondary strategies over the next five years.

Ofsted concluded that the Key Stage 3 strategy, introduced in 2001, had made an “inadequate” impact in 20 per cent of secondary schools.

In half of schools, “the intended substantial transformation in the effectiveness of teaching and sharp rise in standards have not yet occurred”.

Some teachers know too little about their subject, particularly in mathematics, to respond effectively to pupils’ questions.

The report raised concerns about maths teaching generally. There had been a “marked drop” in maths achievement at GCSE compared with results in national curriculum tests at 14.

The initial positive effect of the national numeracy strategy in primary schools had slowed and there was evidence of a rise in unsatisfactory achievement by the youngest pupils. The report said: “Renewed momentum to tackle these issues and improve achievement is needed.”

Ofsted said that the Government’s Primary Leadership Programme, which focuses on heads of the 4,500 weakest schools, had been “compromised by the resistance to change of a small minority of schools and their failure to recognise that raising standards needs to be a key outcome of the programme”.

However, Mr Bell said that he remained “cautiously optimistic” about the capacity of schools to improve. A new inspection regime introduced last month, which gives little or no advance notice of Ofsted visits, would put schools under additional pressure to raise their performance.

He admitted that Ofsted had done too little until now to expose the shortcomings of “those schools which, while not in a state of crisis, are providing nothing better than mediocrity”. “While on the surface all may appear to be well in these schools, if we dig deeper we find that achievement could be better in some subjects, or for some groups of pupils, and that these schools are falling way behind in terms of providing the sort of education we find in our best schools. In short, they are underperforming or ‘coasting’ schools,” Mr Bell said. Overall, 68 per cent of primaries were judged good or better last year and 4 per cent unsatisfactory or poor. Inspectors rated 70 per cent of secondaries good or better and 7 per cent unsatisfactory or poor.

Ofsted said that behaviour had improved slightly, but low-level disruption continued to affect lessons in secondary schools and small numbers of pupils “fail to respond appropriately when admonished”.

Ms Kelly said that the report showed that the Government’s reforms were paying off. “There are still real challenges ahead, but we are now focusing on the rate at which schools improve and how we can accelerate that progress,” she said.

But David Cameron, the Shadow Education Secretary, said that Mr Bell had raised “serious concerns about the quality and standard of education in our schools”.

“This Government is failing to get a proper grip on the basics. Instead of encouraging excellence it is clear that too many schools in England are offering mediocrity,” Mr Cameron said.

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