NEW Labour thinks improvement is achieved by institutions that are big, have targets, and a league table.

This applies not least to education.

Since 1997. the number of secondary schools with more than 1000 students has risen by a fifth. Whitehall thinks small schools are insignificant, complicated, difficult to understand and lack a wow factor.

Yet ask any headmaster which kind of school is easier to manage - a secondary school of 500 or 1,500 pupils - and their answer will be overwhelming.

Smaller schools are more human, you can develop an ethos, spend more time with staff, impose rules and standards more effectively. Anyone who has management experience (which rules out the Cabinet) can work this out.

Yet Labour's approach to education is to close smaller schools and build big ones. Money spent keeping a small school open is automatically presented as waste; spending £25 million on an "extended" school is trumpeted as investment.

Given education was Labour's priority, it is a wretched indictment that 75 per cent of children from deprived areas still leave school without five good GCSEs. Additionally, never before has the money that adults earn determined to such an extent the academic outcome of their children.

Labour's tragedy is not lack of ambition but its determination to achieve its goals with a Leninist-like obsession with central control over ever -larger institutions, motivated by lists of endless targets and plans mixed with a complete disregard for the human factor - which is so crucial to the success of any organisation.

Martyn Cox Lostock