Leading Article: Brown's strategy needs a rethink

No one can quarrel with Gordon Brown's national crusade to increase social mobility over the next decade. Several of the measures he announced in his lecture to the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust on Monday deserve support, notably the doubling in the number of graduates on the Teach First programme, which sends those with good degrees to teach in the toughest schools, and the expansion of nursery places for two-year-olds in the most disadvantaged areas.

Teach First has established a reputation for raising standards in inner-city areas and the nursery pledge, which first emerged when Brown was Chancellor, is a sound way to address the disadvantage. The trouble is that ministers are, once again, giving a mixed message to schools when it comes to helping those most in need. Take, for instance, the Government's much vaunted National Challenge – under which the 638 schools failing to get 30 per cent of their pupils to obtain at least five A* to C grade passes at GCSE including maths and English have been told they face closure unless they impress ministers with their plans for improvement.

The Government's declared aim is to lure more of the brightest teachers into tough inner-city schools. Yet nothing is more likely to put them off from applying to such schools than the thought that a school may close in the next year because of its low GCSE pass rate. Indeed, parents are going to be less likely to choose such a school for their children. No one objects to the idea that all schools should strive for the 30 per cent benchmark but threatening those that do not achieve it with closure – when many of them have been rated as outstanding by Ofsted, the education standards watchdog – is using too blunt an instrument to achieve your ends.

Gordon Brown's heart may be in the right place but he needs to rethink his strategy if he is to succeed. The truth is that some schools which only manage to get 30 per cent of their pupils to achieve the Government's benchmark are sometimes doing a better job than a grammar school which gets 90 per cent because its intake consists of the cleverest children – all of whom would be expected to get five good GCSEs.