Walk into a midday class at The Deans and you will see rows of children sitting at their desks reading. Occasionally a teacher walks past, stops by one of them and quietly checks how he or she is doing.

It is, admits Frances Hartley, head teacher of the primary school in Salford, Greater Manchester, “not exactly rocket science”.

The techniques used by Hartley, whose school came top of last week’s government league tables, are so clear to her that she says it is “frustrating” that other schools seem not to see the sense of them.

While technology such as interactive whiteboards and handheld computers is seized on at The Deans, trendy teaching methods are not. Children are required to learn the times tables by rote. They must also know a set list of words before they are allowed to move on to the next stage of reading.

Parents are told that every day they are expected to read to their children and listen to them reading.

“People talk about back-to-basics, but in our school we’ve never been away from it if that means teaching children to read and write properly and become numerate,” Hartley says. “That is what we are here for.”

But as The Deans was celebrating its success, the British school system was being battered by a succession of surveys that showed an alarming decline in national educational attainment. The studies revealed that performance in literacy, numeracy and science had all worsened compared with key foreign competitors over the past three years.

The figures came despite Labour’s shovelling of tens of billions of extra pounds a year into schools since 1997 in an effort to make the system “world class”.

The poor international performance also contrasted with the government’s insistence that grades in GCSEs and A levels, as well as in primary school assessment tests, have been going up and up.

It is a conundrum that poses some troubling questions. Has the near-continuous upheaval in the education system under Labour led to children leaving school better educated than they were 10 years ago? Or are the three Rs in Britain really sliding behind the rest of the world? Have those billions been poured down the drain?

TONY BLAIR’S education secretaries were often accused of greeting even bad statistics with smug triumphalism.

Ed Balls, right-hand man to Gordon Brown and overlord of England’s schools system, was a good deal more glum when he spoke about the results from the Pisa study, published last week by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

“The scale of these falls is less significant than the direction of change - we have gone backwards,” Balls admitted.

The Pisa study tested 400,000 15-year-olds in 57 countries, including more than 13,000 in Britain, on basic skills. Comparisons are imperfect as other countries have different curriculums and the last Pisa study in which this country appeared, published in 2001, broke Britain down into its four nations. But the trend is evident - and it is bad news for the government.

Britain has fallen to 17th place in reading from England’s seventh in 2001. In science, the slide is from fourth to 14th. In maths, the performance was particularly poor - down from eighth to 24th - making Britain equal to Poland.

The previous week, an international literacy study called Pirls, published by the National Foundation for Educational Research, showed England had dropped from 3rd to 15th place in five years. It pointed to a decline in reading outside school by 10-year-olds because of British children’s addiction to computer games, one of the most pronounced in the world.

The government might have had more chance of explaining away the results if it had not gloated at the apparently good showing in previous international surveys. After England performed well in the 2001 Pisa study, Estelle Morris, then education secretary, described schools as “world-beaters”.

Alan Smithers, professor of education at Buckingham University, suspects that the 2001 figures were little more than a “blip”, because it was the first time the tests had been taken and English students were more used to exams than those in many other countries.

Some critics of the Pisa study point out that Britain has increasing numbers of children in the education system whose first language is not English - whereas Finland, which came top or near the top in every category, is a small, prosperous and homogeneous country where the education system is facing little pressure from immigration.

But the 8.6% of British children taking the Pisa tests who had foreign-born parents was below the 9.3% average for OECD countries. Indeed, Britain was far outperformed by Canada, whose sample included more than 20% of pupils who had immigrant parents.

So Balls is right to be glum at the return on Labour’s huge investment in education. Since it came to power, spending on education has gone from £29 billion to £77.4 billion today and is due to rise to £92 billion in 2010-11. Some 5.9% of the economy is now spent on education, just above the average for the OECD.

The money has gone on numerous initiatives such as literacy and numeracy strategies, new buildings and organisational reforms including the setting up of city academies and expansion of the specialist schools programme.

In Labour’s early years, the results appeared promising. Between 1997 and 2000, the proportion of 11-year-old pupils reaching level four, the expected standard in English, rose from 63% to 75%.

In the following seven years, however, the figure have only risen by another five percentage points. Figures published last week showed results were up by just a single point.

Critics also doubt whether the results proclaimed by the government tell the full truth. They claim that levels of basic skills - like GCSE and A-level grades - have been inflated by easier marking.

“If the grades did what they said on the tin, there wouldn’t be a problem,” said John Bald, a language teaching consultant and former Ofsted schools inspector.

“But the real problem started in 2000 when they found not enough kids were passing the tests. They started moving the marking schemes up and down to keep everyone happy. Pupils can get level five when their writing is really at level three.”

A study published last month for Primary Review, the Cambridge review of primary education, found that “massive efforts to bring about changes have had a relatively small impact”.

Academics at Durham University who carried out the study, led by Peter Tymms, found standards of literacy had barely moved in 50 years and that, while there had been some improvements in literacy since Labour came to power, these had been exaggerated.

“Policies have cost many hundreds of millions of pounds, but they have not generally had a sound research base and have not been systematically evaluated,” said Robert Coe, a reader in education at Durham and a collaborator of Tymms’s.

“If you look at all the data on maths and reading for the past 50 years, there is a reasonable amount of convergence with all the figures except those test results. There is a slight increase in standards, but it’s hardly worth talking about. Papers are being marked more leniently.”

The knock-on effect is felt by the employers and universities who take on the products of the British school system. Their experience confirms that, for all the huge investment, teenagers have not got much better at the three Rs.

Annual surveys by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) regularly show about half of companies complain that recruits of school-leaving age cannot read, write or add up properly.

“There were not glory days when levels of literacy and numeracy were much better, but there should be no escape from admitting a rather depressing situation where we have large numbers of young people who do not achieve adequate literacy and numeracy,” said Susan Anderson, the CBI’s director of education and skills policy.

She added that in some areas, particularly computer use, school leavers were highly skilled. But she pointed out: “People in retail tell us some recruits have no idea how to work out a 10% discount - or they can’t, for example, work out the change if the [automated] till behind the bar breaks down.”

Universities have begun to complain about the lack of basic skills even among students who have scored top grades at A-levels.

A study by Oxford academics last year, based on data from 250 admissions staff from universities including Oxford and Cambridge, found remedial classes in literacy and numeracy aimed at “applicants with top A-level grades as well as those with lower levels of attainment”.

Earlier this year the Royal Society of Chemistry found that first-year science students in English universities arrived with a maths ability equivalent to those expected of 14-year-olds in the national curriculum. In China, by contrast, students about to take science at university are expected to solve difficult mathematical problems.

Richard Pike, the society’s chief executive, expressed his alarm at how many new undergraduates needed to catch up. “The sticking plaster of remedial lessons has become the norm,” he said.

MINISTERS agree that some way has to be found to crack the 20% or so of school-leavers who still lack basic abilities.

The government’s solution, some of which is expected to appear in a “10 year children’s plan” to be announced by Balls on Tuesday, is further overhaul of the curriculum and further reorganisation.

A new overhaul of parts of the national curriculum, the blueprint for what every child needs to know by the age of 16, is to be introduced next year. It places a heavy emphasis on skills rather than knowledge for its own sake.

A foretaste has been provided by Opening Minds, a syllabus designed by the Royal Society of Arts and run by at least 200 schools. This stresses the development of “skills and competences” such as “relating to people”, “citizenship” and “managing situations”, with specific knowledge built around this.

Supporters of this approach argue it is vital for the more flexible work-force required by the 21st century economy. But critics worry that this type of “skills-based” teaching will actually endanger basic skills by robbing children of a broad education.

A planned vocational course in English, equivalent to a GCSE, will allow pupils to gain a qualification without studying any literature; instead it stresses “practical” material such as brochures.

David Perks, head of physics at Graveney school in Tooting, south London, said he was “really worried” about the new curriculum.

“We are moving away from systematic science teaching,” said Perks. “Education is becoming far more about the sociology of science, such as discussing MMR or climate change. It is about science for the consumer, not about how you train people to become scientists.

“The assumption seems to be that a lot of children just won’t get science. The periodic table is there in the new syllabus, for example, but only in relation to food policy.”The clear message is that the Pisa study is right: Britain now seems to have an education system that is often not much better than bog standard, despite the amount of taxpayers’ money spent on it.

Pressure is now mounting on the government to show it can find an approach to teaching basic skills that works – and to stick to it, instead of the constant, expensive and ineffectual upheaval.

“The billions of pounds that have been poured in are a national scandal,” said Coe at Durham University. “Highly expensive programmes are introduced with no proper evaluation of whether they are likely to work. Primary schools are now being turned upside down again with a new revision of the primary strategy for which there’s no good evidence.”

One of Balls’s reforms will be to encourage parents to do more reading with their children, as they do at The Deans in Salford.

“We don’t just have a vague look at the book and discuss the pictures, we tell them exactly what they need to do,” said Hartley, the head teacher.

Her school’s success story has come despite taking a large number of pupils from deprived areas. More than 20% of the children get free school meals, which puts it in the bottom 25% of the country by income. If such an environment can produce the best-performing school in the country, hope is not lost that its achievements can be replicated elsewhere – provided ministers can learn the lessons taught there.

“I teach the times table by the old-fashioned rote method,” said Hartley. “When they know it properly, then it becomes a tool to solve problems.”

Additional reporting: Lee Carter

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