Leading Article: Schools must expect exceptional change

David Blunkett's attempt to raise the sights for primary school attainment could be the best signal yet we have had from this new government that it intends to break free from hand-wringing helplessness, and take the problem of embedded educational under-achievement head on. The vaunted Butler reforms were a set of compromises jerry-built on religious jealousies, professional conservatism and parochialism. A generation on, Jim Callaghan went to Nuffield College and identified system failure - then Shirley Williams vacillated. Among her successors, Sir Keith Joseph agonised and Kenneth Clarke blustered. Now we need need utter clarity of direction - and clear targets are the first big step down that road.

The Conservatives did make important and valuable changes in school organisation, curriculum and (crucially) in the introduction of tests to state schools; Mr Blunkett should acknowledge he is building now on their foundations. But the Tories never quite produced a programme for change in the classroom, in the everyday lives of children. Mr Blunkett has now made a specific pledge around which all the other elements in the education package can be organised: within five years, hundreds of thousands of under-achieving boys and girls ought to be writing, reading, calculating better. Their schools should be giving them a precious thing - the capacity to deal with the fast-changing world in which they will have to study, find work and make their lives. If that promise is realised, Mr Blunkett will deserve accolades. If it is not, he will have failed.

Merely to lodge quantitative targets in the minds of parents, governors, teachers and the public at large is useful. In his task forces, the Secretary of State has thinkers at his elbow to advise on changes in teaching practice, to seed the intellectual climate with ideas about what works in other cultures. But, like his impotent predecessors, Mr Blunkett has few direct means of securing changes in practice in classrooms. English state education is a disarticulated system, its finance a jungle, its industrial relations primitive, and its governance - what was that phrase the former Prime Minister conjured up in the heat of the election campaign? - a pig's breakfast.

Mr Blunkett will have, at least at first, to do what he can with the machinery as it stands. If local education authorities cannot or will not start the intensive training, retraining, and attitudinal change that his scheme demands, direct rule is the only option. Lately, it has sometimes seemed as if social policy ministers and their shadows have been watching too much Tarantino; their talk has been of nothing but hit squads. But if governors or heads will not climb on board, direct action will be the only way of extending change into the schools themselves.

Hit squads can only be a palliative. Teachers need to be re-motivated and governors energised for the long haul. Bad practices and bad teachers may have to be bought out. Even if Mr Blunkett finds the money at the centre, he is going to have to create a way of ensuring it is delivered at the chalkface, and that must surely mean abandoning the pretence that money for schools can be deposited in a general grant for councils in the hope that it will come out intact at the other end. Labour has come to power with some mighty ambiguous thoughts about its devotion to the autonomy of local authorities. For all the protestations of good faith from the local government side, the brutal truth is that local administration has too often failed schools.

The nub of Labour's ambition is to reach into the bad schools, into the problem classes, to the kids at the back who read and spell badly and can't snap back the answer to 9x9. That will require a huge mobilisation of effort, within schools, within local authority areas. A hard question is whether it will, necessarily, involve a degree of neglect of the kids at the front of the class, those in the good schools, those in the high- achieving classes - the kids with middle-class parents who want them to surpass the national curriculum standard. Whole-class teaching works in Taiwan, but brighter children and their parents are prepared, there, to wait patiently while the slower children are brought up to the mark of the quickest. A more British solution might be the extension of setting in primary schools. But such a solution cannot be stipulated at the centre; too much depends on teachers' capacities, school ecology, parents' wishes.

Those parents must not be alienated. The Independent Schools Information Service says entry to private schooling is rising. That may simply reflect rising prosperity and the wish of parents of middle-ability children to secure for them a maximal education return - the best exam results. But the buoyancy of private schools should not be an occasion for gnashing egalitarian teeth. The finding, in a poll, that four-fifths of Labour MPs want to abolish private schools is disquieting. That is partly for the obvious reason that the wish conflicts with their party's intention to incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights: you cannot have personal liberty and abolish the right to private schooling at the same time. But the real point is that it is an illusory answer. Mr Blunkett needs to tell his colleagues that the fate of private schools is a distraction. Their attractiveness is, in large measure, a function of the unreliability of state schools. The closer primary schools come to Mr Blunkett's targets, the more parents will cleave to them. And one big way to achieve that is to ensure that aspiring parents find that their children are led to achieve, not just what is adequate, but what is exceptional, in state schools just as they are in the private sector. It is possible. All that holds them back is the culture that too eagerly accepts the status quo.