Kinnock attacks Blair's education reforms

The former Labour leader Lord Kinnock today makes a startling attack on Tony Blair's education reforms in what are his most forthright criticisms of Downing Street since the party came to power.

Speaking to the Guardian, he condemned the proposals for schools as "at best a distraction and at worst dangerous" and said the government would have to change the white paper radically.

The safeguards to prevent schools breaking free of local authority control and imposing their own selective admissions criteria were, he said, "paper thin and really not satisfactory at all".

Lord Kinnock said the white paper was "a strange document for something setting out such a crucial new strategic direction for education. It looks as if it is written by committee, and the committee should have spent more than an extra week on it".

The peer has had previous differences with Downing Street over Europe, but it is the first time he has laid out such bare political disagreements. The prime minister's proposed education reforms have already provoked a threatened rebellion by up to 100 backbench MPs. Yesterday the government was under renewed pressure after the publication of a National Audit Office report which estimated up to 1 million children are being failed by underperforming schools.

One concern is a lack of headteachers, underlined today by a separate survey which warns of an alarming turnover of senior staff in state secondaries. It shows more than one in three were unable to appoint headteachers last year when they first advertised, and the readvertisement rate rose to more than 50% in London, which was the worst-affected region.

Lord Kinnock will underline his opposition to the reforms when he chairs a meeting next week launching a pamphlet that attacks the white paper for "entrenching existing inequalities in our education and storing up trouble for generations to come". The pamphlet, published by the pressure group Compass, is written by Melissa Benn and Fiona Millar. The latter is the partner of the former No 10 communications director, Alastair Campbell.

Lord Kinnock said yesterday that he admired the campaign being undertaken by Ms Millar, a comment offering a green light to more Labour MPs to join the rebellion: "My concern is that the white paper will lead to further fragmentation of our education system, and God knows over the past 40 years we have had enough segmentation. There is a multiple divergence of governance proposed - specialist schools, trust schools and academies - that gives the appearance of choice, but will not be available to many. This whole approach is also not relevant to rural and semi-rural schools."

"People say there are safeguards, but there are such undeniable inbuilt pressures that will have the effect of reducing the role of individual local authorities, and the importance of the code setting out the rules of admissions. And when you look at the safeguards, they appear paper thin. Fragmentation will have a damaging effect on schools, individuals and ultimately the level of educational performance."

The Guardian by Patrick Wintour, chief political correspondent