David Cameron's Conservatives are re-thinking education policy

This working group has set out a raft of potential education policy ideas for the Conservative leaders to consider.

It also proposes that 11-year-olds who fail to reach the expected levels would re-take the last primary school year.

"If we want to build a better society, we have to start with getting education right," says co-chair Baroness Perry.

The group is putting forward a range of ideas on education, health and housing.

It identifies the AS-level, introduced in 2000 as the first part of an A-level qualification, as an unnecessary burden on pupils - and suggests that it should be scrapped.

'Advantage premium'

"Labour's well-intentioned policies have simply failed: far too many of our pupils are failing in schools and teachers have become demoralised by excessive target setting and control from the centre," says Baroness Perry, who chaired the review group with Stephen Dorrell.

The working group suggests that there should be more small schools - citing evidence that behaviour and results were better in smaller schools or "schools within schools", where larger schools were divided into smaller units.

It also suggests that rather than close smaller suburban or rural schools because of a lack of pupils, such schools could provide places for pupils from inner-city areas.

In an attempt to redress the polarisation between successful and unsuccessful schools - and to tackle the links of educational failure with deprivation - the policy group proposes that extra funding should support children from less well-off areas.

This "advantage premium" would be measured by postcode or at ward level.

Such additional money for deprivation is already a factor in the way schools are funded.

And where local schools are failing, it suggests that parents or charitable bodies should be able to create their own "pioneer" schools, which would be non-selective state schools, which would draw the equivalent of local authority per capita funding.

The working group also emphasises the importance of strengthening the role of teachers - with proposals for a new professional body for teachers, which would help to shape education policy.

The blueprint also reaffirms the Conservatives' commitment to preventing appeals from overturning exclusions - and limiting the damage of false allegations by providing teachers with anonymity until prosecution.