THE government attitude to state education is like its attitude in other areas of public provision. It prefers centralised bureaucratic control rather than trusting the professionals who do the work.

The result is interference in what should be taught, how it should be taught and assessed, an obsession with paperwork and vain attempts to raise standards by means of league tables and performance targets.

While many state schools have managed to maintain standards despite this regime, many more have not. There is poor discipline because there is no apparent penalty for bad behaviour, teachers are demoralised because there is too much prescription about how to do the job, too much paperwork and too much time spent child-minding instead of teaching. Examinations have been degraded to maintain the pretence that education is working well, and too many young people leave school without even basic standards of literacy and numeracy.

What we all want from our schools is to bring up confident well-rounded young people who are capable not just of earning a living but also contributing to society. The aim must be to bring out the best in each child. Parents must be involved in as many ways as possible so that pupils, parents and teachers can share the responsibility for success and take a pride in it. We also regard competitive sports and the teaching of our values and our history as essential.

Give more autonomy to our state schools, to allow teachers freedom over how to teach and what they want to cover outside the curriculum.

Leave schools to organise their own intermediate testing - Standard Aptitude Tests must go.

Leave the decision to exclude unruly pupils to the headteacher without allowing governors, parents or bureaucrats to compromise this authority.

Provide sufficient specialised facilities for excluded pupils.

Encourage schools to specialise in technical or academic disciplines and allow limited selection of pupils.

Scrap the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority to stop interference by government and bureaucrats in setting standards for GCSE and A level examinations.

Insist on school sports, encourage school trips and provide the necessary facilities.

Besides the above measures to improve state schools, the UK Independence Party would go further in exploring a number of possible arrangements involving private schooling. At present, 15 per cent of parents pay for private education and we shall extend this opportunity more widely. We shall introduce a new assisted-places scheme in which the state helps to fund private education for children from poorer backgrounds. We shall consider granting tax rebates or vouchers to help parents to pay for private schools.

While such schemes may be new to Britain, they are commonplace in a number of other countries including the United States and several countries of the European Union. The general experience where parents are able to choose from a variety of schools, some fee-paying and some not, is that more resources are released for the state sector and higher standards are achieved.