Brown to make education a 'personal passion' as PM

Gordon Brown will announce a £35m-a-year drive to improve numeracy in schools as he promises to make education his "personal passion" when he becomes Prime Minister.

After visiting schools in Lewisham, he will tell the CBI President's dinner tonight that there must be "a sharper focus on standards and getting the basics right - with every child able to read, write and add up before they leave primary school".

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As Prime Minister, he will demand urgent action to improve the performance of boys in school. He is worried about the glaring "gender gap" in performance in the education system.

Results show boys do worse than girls at every key stage of the national curriculum and in GCSE's and A-levels. Figures supplied by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service show that about twice as many girls as boys have so far applied to university this year.

The Chancellor's other priorities on education will include widening participation at university by those from the country's most deprived communities.

He first declared his intentions on that score when criticising Oxford University's Magdalene College for refusing a place to a Tyneside comprehensive schoolgirl, Laura Spence, despite the fact she was expected to get four A grades. She eventually went to Harvard.

Mr Brown's third key priority will be to develop new world-class skills qualifications that will be recognised as such by universities and employers.

Today, Mr Brown will announce a review of how numeracy is taught in schools, in which teachers will be closely involved. It will look at how parents can do more to help their children.

He will say: "We are still some way off being world class. It is unacceptable that we still have 150,000 children leaving primary school who aren't numerate. Both a strong economy and an inclusive society require a fully numerate population. The time is now right fundamentally to review how we teach numeracy and to set out a plan for ensuring that every child is numerate by the time they leave primary school."

He will hail the success of the Every Child A Reader programme in raising literacy standards, by targeting the 300,000 children most at risk of falling behind with intensive one-on-one tuition to help them learn to read.

He will announce the introduction of a new matching programme on numeracy, to be named "Every Child Counts" and designed in consultation with maths teachers. The highly intensive, one-to-one support will cost £35m each year by 2010, in addition to £150m a year already earmarked for lower-intensity one-to-one maths tuition.

For those pupils with the greatest need, the programme will involve up to 40 hours of personal tuition. Those just starting to fall behind will receive 10 hours.

The scheme will mean that an average of more than £600 per pupil per year will be spent by 2010 on the 300,000 pupils at risk of leaving primary school without numeracy skills.

In the latest international comparisons for 2003 of the maths scores of nine-to-10-year-olds, England came 10th - above average, and higher than the US, Italy, Australia and Scotland but behind Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan.

Jack Straw, the Commons Leader, will announce a cross-party consultation on how to guarantee parliament a vote before the country goes to war, in line with Mr Brown's pledge on Friday. The Tory Opposition will propose such a move in a Commons debate today.