Blunkett, hoping to end "complacency" over education

New Schools White Paper to be on Offer at Supermarkets

The Government has paired up with a supermarket chain to boost next months launch of its flagship education White Paper. Thousands of copies of a summary version will be handed out to customers at every branch of Tesco.

The supermarket link is just one in a series of initiatives which Education Secretary David Blunkett hopes will make the forthcoming White Paper - on school standards - into a unique public consultation.

David Blunkett, the Minister for Education and Employment is seeking out the views of parents, teachers, business leaders and educationists on how standards in schools could be raised and he is promising to listen to their answers.

To reach the widest audience, Mr Blunkett said, civil servants at the Department for Education and Employment had been asked to break the habits of a lifetime - and make the White Paper readable.

"That doesn't sound earth-shattering. But given the past history of white papers of all political persuasions, it is a daunting task," Mr Blunkett said.

Other moves to promote the consultation process include . . .

• Mr Blunkett and fellow education ministers will attend a series of regional conferences to discuss the proposals - echoing Prime Minister Tony Blair's promised round of meet-the-people discussions.

• The White Paper will be available on the Internet, along with the facility to send suggestions for improvements directly back to the Department for Education and Employment.

• A 15-minute video will be distributed to schools, governors and education authorities, which ministers hope will become the focus of public meetings.

Ministers say the scope of the consultation process is no reflection of a Government short of ideas, ministers say. Instead, it aims to break down indifference to education failure.

"The key message we want to get across to parents is that this has something to do with you, that it matters for your child and your family," Mr Blunkett said. "We need to get across to parents the direct relationship between what goes on in the classroom and the life chances of their children."

The White Paper consultation will end in September. The Education Bill due to follow is intended to deliver the Government's top priority - higher standards in education. If its measures do not succeed, ministers know they will be judged to have failed.

The measures will include . . .

• New targets for schools, new duties for LEAs to help achieve them and new powers to close schools that fail.

• Compulsory home-school contracts, spelling out the rights and responsibilities of parents and teachers.

• A General Teaching Council to promote and regulate the teaching profession - and a "quick but fair" means of removing incompetent teachers.

The broad lines of the Government's education policy were set out before the General Election. But ministers want the widest involvement in deciding how their goals can be achieved. And parents, Mr Blunkett believes, have valuable insights.

"We want their own perceptions of what they expect from the education service, but also we want to know what it is that they think they can contribute," Mr Blunkett said.

"And they also need to know what their responsibilities are ... so that this is an holistic approach to delivering on standards." The scale of the consultation could make the White Paper as widely read as William Beveridge's blueprint for the welfare state - an overnight best-seller in 1942.

Mr Blunkett said, "If I got anywhere near the kind of interest that was engendered at the end of the war I think we will be doing very well. Part of the difficulty we face in Britain at the moment is the culture of complacency that education has been far too much an issue only for middle class dining tables and not enough for the population as a whole. If we begin to touch that in this country we will have started to do a good job."