HUMPHRYS: Now, you will remember Tony Blair's three big concerns: education, education, education. The Tories say he's not delivering on his promise to improve things and they have a plan. They want, in their own words, to set our schools free. Free to do what exactly? Theresa May is the Shadow Education Secretary and I'll be talking to her after this report from Jonathan Beale. WILLIAM HAGUE: We offer parents and children a revolution, free schools, real power to teachers and head teachers. A parents guarantee. This is our common sense revolution. JONATHAN BEALE: William Hague is promising to deliver better schools and standards but teachers and parents will want to know if competition in state education can really offer their children a brighter future. MICHAEL FALLON: This is the most radical document the Conservative Party has ever published and indeed the front cover says a common sense revolution, I mean this really is revolutionary. It's the end of the LEAs and we're going to see a free system of schools which is very very different and which will be different from one another. GILLIAN SHEPHARD: The party will need to reassure the public that it continues to be very concerned with standards in our schools because that is what the public is always concerned about. PETER WALKER: A lot of children would suffer, that would be a certainty. It's not a danger that that would happen, it's a certainty that that would happen. BEALE: These children have left for classrooms where teachers say they're increasingly being told what and how to teach. This government like the last Tory administration has tried to improve schools by setting standards centrally in Whitehall. But the Conservatives now say there's too much government interference, they want to hand power back to schools but there's a real worry that such a policy could allow standards to slip. Abbey School in Faversham Kent is a non-selective school with more than a thousand pupils. The school caters for a wide range of academic ability but whatever their strengths, pupils and teachers here must abide by the National Curriculum. The Tories say 'trust the professionals', they want head teachers like Peter Walker to worry less about regulations. WALKER: It's not just the National Curriculum but the bureaucracy that's gone with it, the bureaucracy that's happened since, the things that we have to report on, the things that we have to do, the people that we're accountable to or more precisely the bodies that we're accountable to and every day seems to bring a new pressure. BEALE: The government says its directives can only improve standards. These eleven year olds are the first to have gone through the government's new literacy hour. It ensures primary school pupils of adequate reading and writing skills before starting secondary school. It's added even more to teachers' workload and the Tories fear it may be too rigid but how many of these reforms dare they scrap without scaring off parents? An academic who helped shape the Tories' policy says nothing should be off limits. DAVID CURRY: I don't think the National Curriculum is necessary at all and many Tories I know agree with that and have agreed ever since it was brought in. You don't need a National Curriculum to ensure standards are kept high, what you need is to ensure its accountability to parents and that will ensure standards are kept high not the national curriculum. BEALE: Music is currently part of every pupil's timetable from the ages of seven to fourteen but not everyone thinks it's essential to a child's education. The Tories want to drastically simplify the National Curriculum but the party is being warned not to hand over too much freedom for schools to set their own agenda. Those overseeing education provision are convinced that reforms like the National Curriculum have had a positive benefit. PAUL CARTER: It's a balance between the controls that are implicit within those regulations but I think you have to have that framework otherwise we're going to go back to the bad old days of the sixties where left of centre teachers were allowed to do what they wanted when they wanted and educational standards suffered most enormously. BEALE: It's a concern shared by the woman who helped bring the National Curriculum into force. SHEPHARD: Look, I remember the time before the National Curriculum. I can remember a time when schools didn't even have to enter children for public examinations and this has resulted in a generation in some areas of educational cripples: that is not acceptable. BEALE: It's parents open evening at Abbey School. They've come to decide whether it's the right one for their child. The Conservatives believe parents are the best judges of standards and they want parents to play a bigger role. The Conservatives are offering parents a guarantee. Parents will have new powers to call in the inspectors if they're unhappy with the way the school's being run. It's the nuclear option. The head teacher and governors could be sacked but the Conservatives say this is one way to ensure high standards. Others warn it will only undermine the teaching profession. Michael and Deborah Liddicoat welcome the opportunity to look around but once they think they've chosen the right school for their son Jordan they believe that their roles should be limited. DEBORAH LIDDICOAT: Teachers and headmasters and governors are probably in a better position to know what's right for a school than perhaps parents. Parents may not be fully informed of what's actually going on in the school. WALKER: I like working with parents because I want to do my best for the children that we have in the town but sometimes parents are not in an adequate position. I would worry too about parents who, with their foibles or whatever just don't like the head teacher and would want to get rid of that head teacher, they don't gel so we'll have a campaign to get rid of. I would worry about that kind of situation. BEALE: A former minister responsible for inner city regeneration says some parents just aren't interested enough to intervene. DAVID CURRY MP: The problem is that if you base all your policy on the assumption that there is a responsible corporately minded body of parents, well it would be nice if that were universally true. It's not universally true, there are inner city schools where there's real social dislocation, where with the best will in the world some people find it difficult to cope. BEALE; The Conservatives are promising not only to give parents more power but more choice too. They say parents have been restrained by local education authorities about where they can send their child. The Tories say they want to unleash the forces of competition into state education. JAMES TOOLEY: We don't go into a supermarket - I going to use an imperfect analogy, but again you don't go to a supermarket and purchase inferior food all the time - very, very rare. Standards are maintained because the companies are sure that the only way they'll get a market is if they maintain standards. The same principle could be true of schools where if there was a real threat of exit, if parents could really not patronise those schools, there's real choice, real freedom for the supply sector, the supply side, then we would see standards being raised. BEALE: The Conservatives say if they were in power good schools would be allowed to expand. New schools could even be set up in the state sector run by private companies or voluntary groups. The teachers warn there'd be chaos, with schools left competing against each other, and some pupils could lose out. SHEPHARD: Choice certainly improves standards, but you must be careful how you organise that choice to be exercised, otherwise you will find that the most vulnerable children and parents will fall out of the bottom of the net, and that is unacceptable. CARTER: It's so easy to let one school grow and find that the school five miles down the road, ten miles down the road is on the cusp of balancing its budget. It may lose ten, fifteen, twenty pupils and is then in a spiral of decline, so there are a lot of factors that have to be thought about before you can just say: right this is a good school, there is parental demand, without throwing other schools within the vicinity into financial turmoil and then into a spiral of decline educationally. BEALE: Those on the right say the answer is simple. Close down the bad schools. FALLON: There's always a danger in any market of course that schools will fail, but I'd like to see schools that aren't delivering collapse. The idea of keeping the same twenty-four thousand schools in aspic forever shows just how inflexible the present system is. We don't have enough new schools being started up and we don't have enough failing schools actually being taken out of the system altogether. ACTUALITY. BEALE: Abbey School houses one of only two special needs units in Kent for autistic children. A service the local education authority believes can only be provided strategically. LEAs like Kent, itself Conservative controlled, are worried about being stripped of so much responsibility, but they're being told the market will do a better job. FALLON: It's very hard to see what the purpose of having the LEA is. We're not in the business of keeping people as bureaucrats just for the sake of it. if we don't need education authorities anymore. We no longer have local food boards you know. We had to have them in the war but we don't need them now. If we don't have to have LEAs for goodness sake let's get rid of them and get the money to where it should be which is into the hands of the head teachers and the governors. SHEPHARD: There are other areas where an LEA should I think, have a strategic view, or somebody should and why not locally, locally accountable politicians of the provision of school places, the education of special needs children. Those sorts of areas which can't be left to individual schools. The important thing is democratic accountability. BEALE: Many parents may be more interested in wider choice than in the detail of how it'll be provided, but many teachers are still left worrying about children living in deprived areas where the promise of choice may have little meaning. WALKER: I think we might get chaos in some parts. I think we might find some schools for example that go - really do go to the wall. I think we would find a lot more children out on the streets than in schools in some areas. I would think we would find a lot more good schools as well, but we wouldn't find too much in between. It's almost like making sure that you're dealing with massive businesses all over the place, and in this modern world some of them succeed and succeed very well, some are taken over, others just go the wall. What happens to those children in schools that go the wall? BEALE: Competition may offer more choice for the more affluent families, just the kind of voters that the Tories are anxious to win back, but as the Conservatives flesh out their policies they'll have to prove that disadvantaged children whose parents exercise little influence will not be denied their right to a decent education. HUMPHRYS: Jonathan Beale reporting there.