Teachers must back reforms to get £1bn windfall, Morris insists

There was no evidence of jubilation yesterday inside Sanctuary Buildings,the home of the Department for Education and Skills, the day after the bumper windfall for schools.

"I'm obviously pleased I've got the money," said Estelle Morris, the Education Secretary. "It shows to the outside world that education remains a priority of this Government, but it is a huge responsibility as well. Having invested this amount of money in our schools, people expect us to deliver ... and we will deliver."

To that end, she was making public a 31-page document outlining radical reforms to Labour's once-cherished comprehensive schools system, which will be paid for using £12.8bn extra funding for education over the next three years. The document makes clear that the country is moving towards a specialist school system, in which the majority of secondary schools will be specialising in one subject or another. The days of the "one- size-fits-all" comprehensive are numbered.

"This is not about a two-tier education system," Ms Morris said. "It is not about bringing back selection. It is about putting every single school on a ladder of improvement."

All schools will be given an extra windfall, provided there is agreement with teachers on the reforms. On top of the additional £50,000 available for most secondary schools from next year, there will also be "leadership incentive grants" worth £125,000 available to inner-city schools to help them attract the best teachers and remove weak staff.

"If they're good schools, the money will just go to them to use as they want," she said. "Bad schools will be given it in return for a development plan.

"Some of the things it could be spent on would be attracting the best teachers, best heads, remodelling the leadership team, even replacing the head if the head is a problem."

More bluntly, her philosophy was summed in the words: "If the head is a block to improvement, the head must go."

Ms Morris made clear she believes that a successful headteacher leads to a successful school. "Many schools improve dramatically with a change of leadership, by changing the head," she said.

In future, headteachers might have to take over the running of a federation of schools – their own and failing schools near by. "I don't know whether the badge and the blazer would be the same," the minister said. "That would be a decision which would be up to the school itself."

Ms Morris is the first secretary of state for education to have taught in the comprehensive system. For 18 years she was a teacher at the Sydney Stringer community school in Coventry.

Asked what her reaction would have been if she as a teacher had heard a secretary of state talking as she was about a £12.8bn windfall for schools, she said: "I always ask that question of myself. It's a key question. I'd probably say it sounds all right but let's see if it happens. I hope my reaction would be 'At least she understands the way we work.' I'm not going to say that I would jump over the moon at what I've just said."

She said she believed that one of the central parts of her reforms would be the negotiations over the teacher's contract. "Why on earth, for instance, do you have to have a teacher invigilating exams? Why on earth do they have to do the photocopying?

"Why, too, can't you have a classroom assistant taking away a group of pupils and teaching them literacy in a small room by themselves? Why can't you have well-trained classroom [assistants] covering for a lesson in the teacher's absence? You can't by law and this is the sort of thing I want to see covered as a result of the negotiations."

Discipline would have to be improved, hence the promise of a "sin bin" in every school that needs one "to take troublemakers out of the classroom". There are targets to cut truancy by 10 per cent by 2004, although Ms Morris admitted: "This is a second attempt. We didn't meet the first target." This time, though, there will be more cash for truancy sweeps of shopping centres and the 33 pilot areas that have agreed to take police into schools will be doubled in number.

Ms Morris left parents in no doubt that she backed firm measures against those who condoned their children playing truant or who abused or assaulted teaching staff. "It's something that I never came across when I was at school," the Education Secretary said. "Talking to teachers, abusive parents is a phenomenon which appears to have grown up recently. We seem to have been concentrating more on people's rights than their responsibilities but maybe the pendulum is changing."

She said good schools could be given more control over their spending. "If in 1997 we'd said to schools that we've got all this money for the primary literacy and numeracy strategy but, hey, you don't need to spend it on that if you don't want to, it would have been the schools that most needed a strategy that would have ignored it," she said.

Now,the best schools had accepted the drive to improve standards and only the poorly performing ones needed the stick to accompany the carrot, she said.