Lib-Dems nutty sums offer help to education

The price of a packet of peanuts, contributed once a week by the average taxpayer, would make a dramatic improvement to education, Paddy Ashdown said yesterday.

Deploring the politicians' and media obsession with predictions, the Liberal Democrat leader told a campaign press conference: "What people want to hear is not predictions of an outcome that no one can predict, but what the parties stand for, how much will it cost and what will be the result."

Don Foster, the party's education spokesman, said the Liberal Democrats would be pledging an extra pounds 500m for the refurbishment of school buildings over the five-year lifetime of a parliament, as part of its pounds 2bn-a-year programme for education - and paid for by an extra penny in the pound on income tax. Mr Ashdown said that investment programme would cost the average taxpayer 45p a week.

"That's a packet of peanuts at a local pub," he said. "That's less than half a Lottery ticket. But for that you really can do something to save teachers' jobs, to give kids in this country a chance of being in a class of 30 or no more by the end of the century, to give every child in this country pre-school education."

Mr Foster said his party's educational investment programme would also deliver a "very significant hike" in the money spent on books and equipment in schools.

"For example, in the first year, we're committed to an increase that would mean the average comprehensive school, with 1,000 pupils, would get pounds 110,000, and the average primary school is going to get something in the region of pounds 18,000 on top of the levels they already get."