Children spend about 15,000 hours of their lives in the classroom. It is staggering how little some of them learn. Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, said on Wednesday that England’s education system was failing too many young people. It was not good enough, he said, that one in five children enters secondary school unable to meet the required level of English. “We cannot rest until we have an education system that is world class,” he said.

That phrase was no accident. The drive to raise standards is not only a moral imperative, but vital to sustain competitiveness. As English universities shut chemistry departments, Asian ones are turning out hundreds of thousands of students with hard science degrees. While top independent schools export their knowledge, setting up branches in Shanghai and Dubai, UK state schools are slipping down international league tables.

The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, which tests 15-year-olds in developed nations, found that between 2000 and 2003 the UK slumped from 4th to 11th in science and from 9th to 19th in maths.

This matters even more than it used to. US Federal Reserve figures show how the pay gap between graduates and nongraduates has widened dramatically since the mid1980s. It is almost as if those with only high-school education are no longer competing in the same economy as those with college degrees. Technology and globalisation have put a premium on organisational and conceptual skills, and changed the nature of work. We have to raise standards, if people are not going to be trapped in miserable lives.

Dame Mary Richardson used to be head of a school in Harlesden. When she joined, 8 per cent of pupils were gaining five good GCSEs. When she left, 61 per cent did so. She is now chief executive of HSBC’s Global Education Trust. “Everywhere you go, people say we have different problems,” she says. “But there are common themes around the world. Like any business, you need leadership, effective delivery in the classroom, and customer satisfaction. Student alienation is a huge issue: in some countries that takes the form of suicide and depression; in others it is smashing up the classroom . . . but you can solve it in the same ways.”

It was HSBC that first piloted the idea of personal tutors, which Gordon Brown has just made national policy in his party conference speech this week. Dame Mary says: “We found with many looked-after children you would just start to get them in and then they would vanish.” HSBC has financed four schemes that give children in care a personal tutor who is committed to them through to the end of university – and who, it is hoped, will help more of them to get that far.

“Personal” is the new buzzword. Mr Brown spoke last week of “learning personal to each”, and an end to “one-size-fits all” education. Tony Blair began to replace the monolithic comprehensive structure with different types of school, in particular specialist schools and city academies. The “personalisation” mantra is meant to signal that, whatever the school structure, children who are struggling will get extra tailored help.

“Personalisation is nothing new,” says John Fallon, of Pearson Education. “My dad was a teacher for 40 years and I shouldn’t think he ever used the term, but he knew that every child is different and that different children learn in different ways. What is new is that technology helps us make that process much more rapid, precise and direct. It gives the student direct feedback and takes them away from the peer group, where it can be harder to admit when you don’t understand.”

Rapid, a Pearson product, is aimed at boys who struggle with reading. Using speech-recognition software, a computer can get boys to read into a microphone. It can prompt hesitant readers, help with pronunciation and give feedback to the teacher. Bold images and headsets make it “feel less like school”, Mr Fallon says. The National Foundation for Educational Research has found that it more than doubles children’s progress.

Software also makes it easy to benchmark results. Some programs analyse exam results in detail, to show students how close they came to an A, for example. Such data could also be used to compare results of students from similar backgrounds and schools. That could put an end to one of the most pernicious of the excuses that litter Britain’s education system – that poor performance is the result of disadvantage.

Ninestiles School, Birmingham, is something of a shrine to personalised learning, its walls sporting individual pupils’ test results and personal plans. Everyone knows what level they are at, and their plan for progress. Pupils are told that there will be four sets in some subjects, and are asked which they want to be in. The results are astonishing. When Sir Dexter Hutt became headteacher in 1988, only 7 per cent of pupils gained five A to Cs at GCSE. Now 78 per cent do so. The school has the biggest wireless network in Europe and 1,300 laptops.

While Ninestiles is making all transparent, some teaching unions still try to suppress information. They argue that school league tables and Ofsted, the schools watchdog, should be abolished. It is demoralising to teachers, they say, to compare schools that have very different intakes.

Unions are wary of information partly because it fuels competition. One great tension in British schooling is between policymakers’ desire to raise standards through competition, and teachers’ instinct for collaboration. However, the two things are not mutually exclusive. Ninestiles encourages pupils to break records, but is also in a federation of three schools that share ideas and resources. The results of all three have improved.

Some people think the future will be determined not by geography but by culture. David Willetts, the Conservative education spokesman, said: “I don’t think the future of education is the free-standing school model, any more than the future of retailing is the village shop.” There are economies of scale, he believes, that are not being reaped by what is still essentially a cottage industry. Local education authorities used to take on capital projects, payroll and so on, but they are local monopolies. Mr Willetts sees a time when like-minded schools band together across the country to provide real competition and choice.

The United Learning Trust, a charity that runs both independent schools and city academies, is one example. Hackney Learning Trust has taken over Hackney council’s services into a private not-for-profit trust. So, there is more than one way of innovating.

The 2005 Education White Paper established the principle that providers beyond the state, should be encouraged to set up schools. That was a philosophical leap in Britain. New York has set up an office to advise providers. Since 2003 nearly 200 secondary schools, each with no more than 500 pupils, have opened in New York. The idea is that increased supply, and decentralisation, will lift standards through choice.

Britain is far off such liberalisation. “In any other sector with so many poor performers and so much money,” says Andrew Haldenby, of the think-tank Reform, “new entrants would challenge failing incumbents. Technical barriers to entry are low. The barrier is government control of funding.”

Schools seeing most improvement seem to be those with determined headteachers not afraid to innovate. Technology opens opportunities. The Government is moving slowly to decentralise, but ironically has had to drive decentralisation top-down, in what is a static system. We must surely take a leaf out of New York’s book, and open the market far more dramatically. We cannot afford, morally or financially, to fail another generation of children.

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