POORLY performing primary school children could be forced to attend summer schools or resit their entire final year under proposals put forward by the Conservatives.

David Cameron, the party leader, said he would “look carefully” at the conclusions of a policy review his party has carried out on education and public services.

Cameron has also backed a proposal to raise head teachers’ budgets in return for them admitting youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds. Under the scheme, backed by Cameron in a newspaper article today, there would be a £6,000 per pupil “advantage premium”.

The policy review, called Restoring Pride in Our Public Services, will be published on Tuesday. It also includes a proposal on truancy for schools to be held accountable for locally agreed targets on curbing unauthorised absence. This would replace Whitehall-imposed national targets for cutting truancy.

The Conservatives say the government has failed to curb truancy, pointing to official figures which show truancy has risen from more than 965,000 pupils missing classes 10 years ago to 1.4m now.

The report recommends: “The most effective form of tackling truancy is to move away from failed national targets to a system of local targets . . . to be included in league tables as a measure with satisfaction of the school.”

Other initiatives in the report include “pioneer schools” that could be set up jointly by parents, voluntary groups and charities. They would be state-funded, but councils would have no control over them. In other proposals, council tenants would receive further help to buy their homes. Elderly people would be given a budget for home help.

The review led by Stephen Dorrell, a former cabinet minister, is one of six the Tories are announcing in the run-up to their party conference at the end of this month. A spokesman emphasised that the report was not yet party policy.

The proposals show Conservative party determination to seize the agenda on education - an area often seen as Labour’s home territory. The announcements come as Ed Balls, the children’s secretary, pointed to slow progress.

He will write to all head teachers in England tomorrow, warning they need to improve results, particularly for children aged 5-7 and 11-14, and that schools had “still some way to go to deliver a world-class education”.

He said that, while results for A-level students and children aged 7-11 had been good, in other age groups schools had “not made a lot of progress over the past year”. He said that in the letter he would be urging head teachers to improve discipline and “get back to the basics in terms of English and maths”.

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