Education Correspondent Lindsay Jennings asks the region's educationalists to mark the Government's efforts to deliver on its 1997 election victory pledge of 'education, education, education'

CONSIDERING Tony Blair was swept into power on a wave of "education, education, education", the tide has turned against him towards the end of his first five years.

According to teaching unions, morale is at rock bottom and the red tape attached to every new educational initiative only gives teachers less quality time to do the job they are employed to do.

Although more students than ever are applying to become teachers - up a fifth on this time last year to 29,445 - headteachers say that not enough is being done to retain quality staff.

Even the foreign army of teachers drafted in to cover the staffing crisis in Britain's schools is not enough to stop the rot. There have been reports of many going home within two weeks, and a third quitting before the end of the first term stating the violence and abuse they suffer at the hands of unruly pupils is worse than in the Third World.

Says Terry Bladen, a national executive member of the teachers' union NASUWT and a teacher at a Darlington secondary school: "Under the Tories, I think the main thing as far as teachers were concerned was being landed with initiative after initiative, and that has not changed. Neither has the amount of bureaucracy - we have to jump through hoops for everything.

"I would say teacher morale is at an all-time low."

Two of the biggest problems in education that Mr Bladen sees is the way that the "pupil weight unit" differs from each area. It means children attending schools in Middlesbrough are worth about £250 more than down the road in Darlington. Neither does he like the way headteachers and governors have been left as masters of their own budgets and school functions.

"I think local education authorities have an important function to play and we would rather see the salary side of things being handled by the local education authority," he says.

"I think Labour is delivering, in that it is a step forward from the Conservatives, but only in the sense of more money going into schools. It still has conditions attached to it."

In primary schools, that money has gone into delivering Labour's one key education pledge in its 1997 manifesto: reducing class sizes to under 30 for five to seven year olds. This has meant that more than 70 new classrooms have been built in the North-East - the first substantial investment in school fabric for 30 years - and teachers have been employed to staff them.

This has been Labour's biggest success and it has helped, along with the introduction of the numeracy and literacy hours, to improve primary standards.

Other successful Labour initiatives include the Excellence in Cities scheme, designed to help inner city schools. A total of 48 education authorities get funding from the cities scheme, covering 995 secondaries and 1,346 primaries. It includes tactics such as using learning mentors and learning support units to help disaffected pupils, as well as giving special help to gifted children showing promising results.

Another positive aspect of Labour's five years has been the rise of the specialist school. This reform started life as a Conservative initiative and was brought in to cover the cracks of the failing City Technology Colleges initiative. It has been supported and refined by Labour with the aim of having 1,500 specialist schools by 2006.

In theory, schools go specialist in order to concentrate on one subject area - technology, sport, arts or languages - with an extra half a million pounds available countrywide from the Government.

Schools have to come up with £50,000 worth of sponsorship first and are allowed to select ten per cent of their intake. They share best practice with their often less fortunate neighbours and their results speak for themselves.

But critics point out that if your school is not in an inner city or is struggling to achieve specialist school status, there is a tendency to fall behind further.

"If you become a specialist school you get all sorts of extra money, but there are a lot of other schools which are doing just a good job which are missing out," says Mr Bladen.

"The best way to address funding is to equalise the amount each pupil brings to a school and have the money up front, so schools know where they are at."

This Labour Government will also stand out for its enthusiasm towards school league tables, regardless of the pressure it places on headteachers to achieve outstanding national test results.

The burden actually increases if the local authority is in a high achieving area.

In North Tyneside, 73 per cent of 11-year-olds achieved level four in maths last year, and that target has now risen to 90 per cent by 2004.

Added to this is the constraints of the national curriculum and the Government's much-hailed literacy and numeracy strategies to drive up standards.

Judith Pressley, headteacher of Ingleton CE Primary School, near Darlington, says: "I think a lot of staff are pressurised into producing good results for their school and we are also paid by results in a lot of ways through systems the Government has introduced, such as performance management threshold.

"Curriculum wise, I think there are still a lot of changes taking place and I think it is detrimental to teachers because the changes need time to bed into the system.

"I don't think young people are looking at teaching as a career they would like to follow because of the complexity and learning - it's very regimented now and there's no initiative left or creativity.

"But since Labour have come into office, there is more money going directly to schools, which is good because individual schools know what to spend the money on."

One of the most challenging reforms to hit secondary schools and further education colleges came with the sweeping A-level changes in Curriculum 2000.

The luxury of having a year in the lower sixth to study towards A-levels was consigned to the history books as students were faced with a plethora of exams with new AS-levels and key skills tests.

The reforms have brought severe criticism from heads exasperated with the over-crowded examination system.

David Dunn, headteacher of independent Yarm School, in Stockton, Teesside, says: "In the end, education is about growing up and understanding oneself and one's role in society, and there are many ways to do that other than jumping through narrow assessment hoops.

"My biggest gripe is that you get governments that only take a short-term view. We haven't had any coherence to the education system, either from the Conservatives or Labour for many, many years. We keep on going from little initiative to little initiative.

"I wish I had confidence that somebody out there could tell me where education is going to be in the next 20 years. Someone simply has to talk to teachers, headteachers and unions, because this is why coherence is lacking."