Leading Article: Brown risks wasting money

The Prime Minister and his education ministers would do well to study this week's report from the liberal CentreForum think-tank, Tackling Educational Inequality. It says it would be "wasteful" to spend the £17bn needed to carry out Gordon Brown's pledge to raise state sector education spending to the level of that in the private sector. Instead, the pamphlet argues, it would be better to concentrate that money on youngsters from the most deprived backgrounds. The effect would be the same – raising standards in the state sector.

We might quarrel with the word "wasteful", but it is true that a colossal sum is necessary to bring the pledge to fruition and we need more information about how Mr Brown intends to go about delivering on it rather than repeating it as an aspiration.

It also appears that a consensus is emerging – witness the recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation report on the performance of white boys, and Professor Alan Smithers in a recent report from the right-wing think-tank Politeia – that a massive spending injection is necessary to improve the performance of young people in the most deprived neighbourhoods.

Some of the measures recommended by CentreForum would make the kind of radical package Mr Brown needs to strengthen his credibility as the prime minister who sought to end child poverty. These include a major reduction in class sizes in urban primary schools – seen to have worked in Tennessee, according to research from the USA – and bonuses of up to 15 per cent for teachers in "hard to reach" schools. (This is akin to the social priority allowances paid to teachers in deprived schools in the 1960s and 1970s, phased out during the Thatcher administration.)

Saturday morning classes and a return to more summer schools would also be a good idea, as research shows that young people from the lowest socio-economic groups are likely to forget more of what they have learnt as they often lack stimu-lation during the long summer holidays.

The central recommendation of the report – giving a £3,000 bonus to any school accepting a pupil from a disadvantaged home – may be more difficult politically for the Government to support, as it would mean a much more pointed discrimination against the middle classes who use the state sector. The rest, though, amounts to a package worth considering.