Half Britain's schools fail to make grade

JUDITH JUDD

Education Editor

Half of Britain's primary schools and 40 per cent of secondary schools are failing their pupils, according to a damning report by Chris Woodhead, the government's chief inspector, who blames trendy teaching methods for lowering standards.

Labour described the figures as a "very serious indictment" of the Government's education policies, while Gillian Shephard, the Secretary of State for Education, immediately announced that she would publish this year's league tables for primary schools .

Mr Woodhead says in his annual report published yesterday that schools urgently need to tackle mediocre standards in literacy and numeracy, and teaching in about 20 per cent of lessons was poor.

He also questions the prevalent assumption of teachers for the last 25 years that children should be taught as individuals or in small groups. "I am not saying that whole class teaching should be the only method used but there should be more of it," Mr Woodhead said.

Mrs Shephard defended the Government against the charge that 17 years of Conservative rule had failed to raise school standards by pointing to a series of reforms from regular inspection to national tests.

The report, based on 4,000 inspections, follows last week's national test results when half 11-year- olds failed to reach the expected standards.

Mrs Shephard said the test results and Mr Woodhead's report showed schools must be made fully accountable, adding: "Schools should set targets for their own improvement. The messages in the report are ones which every teacher can - and should - think long and hard about."

David Blunkett, Labour's education spokesman, said: "This report is a very serious indictment of the failure of the Government to raise standards in primary schools. There is a real problem which must now be tackled as a matter of urgency."

Mr Woodhead said there was much good news to celebrate in schools, with most lessons rated satisfactory or better, but there were still unacceptably wide variations between different schools' achievement.

"The most successful secondary schools achieve GCSE results twice as good as others in similar socio-economic circumstances and six times better than those achieved by the least successful in the less favoured areas," he said.

His Office for Standards in Education estimates that there are 15,000 bad teachers - about 3 per cent - and 48,000 first-rate ones.

Teaching is worst for seven-to-11-year-olds because some teachers do not have a good grasp of their subject. Standards are too low among 11 to 14-year-olds because schools use their weakest teachers for this age group. Teachers needed to make more use of traditional methods such as phonics in teaching reading, he said.

Teaching methods are not good enough in nearly half primary schools and one-third of secondaries, the report says. One primary school in seven urgently needs to concentrate on spelling and handwriting as well as creativity.

Nigel de Gruchy, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, said: "It is wrong and simplistic to blame the failure exclusively on teachers: there are other deep-seated causes such as disruptive children, uncaring and unco-operative parents and curriculum overload. Merely sacking teachers will not solve the problem."

Teachers were also angry about Mrs Shephard's decision to publish primary school league tables next year.

David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, pointed out that Mrs Shephard said only two weeks ago that league tables would not be published until the tests had "bedded down". That could not be the case until 1997 at the earliest.

Books shortage, page 6

Leading article, page 18