He said: “If you are not careful, when you announce extra money for the health service, people turn up at the doctors’ surgery the next morning and say ‘where is it?’”He insisted that the publication of 10-year plans and targets would help to manage expectations. “Sure, there is a great deal to do but I think it would be a mistake to say nothing has happened.”Mr Blair conceded that managing public expectations was “a big problem”. “It takes a long time to turn around a failing public service,” he said. The record of the last five years shows that those assumptions have been well made,” he said.However, the Prime Minister admitted that his drive to improve public services was taking time.

During his grilling by the chairmen of Commons’ select committees, Mr Blair insisted the spending announced on Monday would withstand a slump and the stock market turmoil “They are based on the most cautious assumptions. Close aides said his plans were based on sufficiently cautious projections to withstand short-term problems such as this week’s stock market fall.However, allies admitted that Mr Brown might be forced to raise taxes, increase borrowing and curb spending in the event of a full-scale slump “It might be a combination of all three,” one said. “I think if public services don’t improve by the next election, people will hold us heavily to account,” he said.The Chancellor denied his spending programme was a “huge gamble” because of the uncertain global economic outlook. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown sought yesterday to allay fears that their ambitious plans to boost public spending could be blown off course by an economic slump. The release of that increase will be subject to an agreement … that we now have that reform.”The cash for reforming the profession amounts to more than £1bn of the £12.8bn over the next three years that the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, pledged for schools on Monday. It includes the increased payments to headteachers that will give the average secondary school an extra £50,000 next year..

Ms Morris also promised learning support units – or “sin bins” to deal with troublesome pupils – for every school that needed one.Ms Morris said: “We are in negotiation with the teachers’ unions over a reform of the profession and I know I’ve got to have some money on the table to bring about the changes I want.”However, all that money for the remodelling of the workforce is in exchange for reform. Estelle Morris will refuse to hand over up to £1bn of the new money for schools if teachers fail to accept radical changes to the way they work.
The Secretary of State for Education underlined her tough line on modernising the profession, including a far bigger role for classroom assistants, in an exclusive interview with The Independent yesterday, the day she outlined her reforms to MPs.Other central elements are to target poorly performing schools by giving governors grants which can be used to pay off headteachers and bring in proven replacements. “If in 1997 we’d said to schools that we’ve got all this money for the primary literacy and numeracy strategy but, hey, you don’t need to spend it on that if you don’t want to, it would have been the schools that most needed a strategy that would have ignored it,” she said.Now,the best schools had accepted the drive to improve standards and only the poorly performing ones needed the stick to accompany the carrot, she said.. “Talking to teachers, abusive parents is a phenomenon which appears to have grown up recently. We didn’t meet the first target.” This time, though, there will be more cash for truancy sweeps of shopping centres and the 33 pilot areas that have agreed to take police into schools will be doubled in number.Ms Morris left parents in no doubt that she backed firm measures against those who condoned their children playing truant or who abused or assaulted teaching staff. There are targets to cut truancy by 10 per cent by 2004, although Ms Morris admitted: “This is a second attempt. “Why on earth, for instance, do you have to have a teacher invigilating exams? Why on earth do they have to do the photocopying?”Why, too, can’t you have a classroom assistant taking away a group of pupils and teaching them literacy in a small room by themselves? Why can’t you have well-trained classroom [assistants] covering for a lesson in the teacher’s absence? You can’t by law and this is the sort of thing I want to see covered as a result of the negotiations.”Discipline would have to be improved, hence the promise of a “sin bin” in every school that needs one “to take troublemakers out of the classroom”.