Estelle Morris: "Strategies beginning to pay off"

Teaching needed further improvement - and there should be more selection in secondary schools, he said.

"We've got a multi-tiered education system now.

"It makes an enormous difference whether your daughter or your son goes to one school or another in the same area.

"What we need to do is to improve it for everybody, not just for the high fliers but for those at the bottom of the heap as well."

Rising standards

But the School Standards Minister, Estelle Morris, said the national literacy and numeracy strategies in primary schools were paying off and many more children were now equipped with the skills they needed for their secondary schooling.

"The greatest progress has actually been made by the children in areas that are the most challenging - in local authorities that serve the most deprived communities," she said.

John Bangs of the National Union of Teachers said comprehensive education had delivered steadily rising standards.

He thought Dr Marks was using out-of-date figures.

"It's not that he doesn't know what he's talking about, he does, but it's so skewed in terms of what he wants to achieve that it doesn't help the debate about how to improve schools," he said.