Since the much praised series of articles on the crisis in education published in the Guardian earlier this month by award-winning journalist Nick Davies, it has emerged that chancellor Gordon Brown may have a "war chest" of up to £12bn available.
We have asked eight leading educationalists - including the chief inspector of schools, Chris Woodhead, Ted Wragg, professor of education, university of Exeter, and Doug McAvoy of the national union of teachers - how they would spend £5bn to improve our children's prospects.
Bulldoze the old schools? A 10% pay rise for teachers? Smaller class sizes?
A learning assistant in every primary school classroom?
Or a much more sophisticated funding system which recognises deprived schools and is able to direct money according to the greatest need?
Chris Woodhead, chief inspector of schools, Ofsted
If significant extra resources were to be made available to education I would like to see them spent in two areas.
Firstly, on tackling the backlog of repairs and renovation in many schools.
Secondly, on increasing pay for good teachers. I believe good teachers deserve the maximum remuneration. That is why I support the introduction of performance pay to enable those who are doing a good job to receive the financial reward they deserve.
Ted Wragg, professor of education, University of Exeter
Bulldozers for the millennium is the slogan. School buildings must be a top priority, as some are a disgrace. Children should not have to learn in slums.
In Birmingham, about 40% of schools were built before 1950 and many need extensive repair. The rest were constructed mainly between 1950 and 1974, not always to high standards.
Equipment must now be given priority, as well as proper facilities for activities such as sport. Why should city technology colleges be awash with computers, while the average Scumbag council school classroom has two between 32 pupils?
Paying all competent teachers a decent salary is another important issue. Nearly half the teaching profession will retire in the next decade. Money may not be the only factor in recruitment and retention, but it is important. Teachers are paid well below contemporaries with similar talents and responsibilities. Salaries paid to junior university lecturers are scandalously low.
The training of new and experienced teachers should be better funded. The teacher training agency has reduced the money so drastically that many universities are giving up undergraduate training places at a time of great teacher shortage.
Secondment for experienced teachers to update themselves is virtually non-existent, yet we are in the greatest whirlwind of change in our history.
There is one strategy that would cost nothing. Schools are buried in bureaucracy because teachers and heads are not trusted. It is wiser to trust people first and only hound those who let you down. As a result more of teachers' time would be spent on the job.
Peter Mortimore, director, Institute of Education, University of London
An extra £5bn sounds a lot, but it represents only about 13% of our annual education bill. I would advise David Blunkett to begin by negotiating a new contract where teachers give up some of their holidays for planning, administration and staff development in return for a substantial pay increase.
An offer of 10% to 12% would lift morale and attract keen new entrants. I would also advise him to employ school social workers - say, two for each primary or special and five for each secondary school - to liaise with parents and to provide counselling for pupils.
He could also double the number of classroom assistants to support learning and free teachers from routine tasks. All this could be achieved for less than £2bn.
Given the sorry state of so many school buildings, I suggest that he commissions our best architects to design top quality schools in our most depressed areas and begin a refurbishment programme of all schools. More funds would be needed over the years but £1bn would be a good start.
This would leave £2bn for computers (and the requisite training), new books and equipment. It would also leave my colleagues in universities, and all who work in further and adult education, questioning my commitment to lifelong learning. But hard choices force one to prioritise.
Of course, cash, however welcome, will not solve the problems of the system. As a society we still have to decide whether we should promote an elite group or whether we should strive to enhance the achievement of the majority. If we really believe in the latter, we need to debate the profusion of different types of schools, the nature of examination and test regimes, the impact of selection and streaming and outmoded views of intelligence. A significant injection of new money by the government could provide just the confidence to start such a debate.
John Dunford general secretary, Secondary Heads Association
The problems highlighted by Nick Davies need radical solutions and massive extra resources. They will not be solved by soundbite politics.
The financing of schools has been misleadingly named fair funding by the government. It isn't fair at all. An arcane formula gives more money to some areas than others and schools are funded largely according to pupil numbers rather than pupils' needs.
Consequently, schools like Silverdale suffer poor funding and schools in disadvantaged areas, like Abbeydale Grange [which featured in Nick Davies's articles], find it even harder to match their meagre resources to their pupils' needs. Large classes and overworked teachers survive only through the superhuman efforts of Bleeper Man.
What is needed is a national funding formula for schools, with a built-in deprivation factor to target substantial additional resources to the areas of greatest need. Using a better indicator of deprivation than the number of children taking free school meals, I would double the funding to the schools with the highest deprivation factor and introduce a sliding scale of extra funding according to need.
The decision on how the extra money should be spent is best made by the schools themselves and sufficient accountability exists in the system to safeguard the spending of such a massive injection of public money.
Smaller classes, more teachers and adult helpers, behaviour units for disruptive pupils, improved working conditions and many other measures would transform the education of children in disadvantaged areas.
While the chancellor's war chest is being directed towards the fight against deprivation all around the country, the government should also fund a research project to devise a fair, independent, value-added method of judging the performance of schools. Only then can there be any legitimacy in comparing the efforts of Abbeydale Grange and Silverdale.
My proposals would make Abbeydale Grange, and schools like it, winners. Now that really would be fair funding.
Tamsyn Imison, headteacher, Hampstead comprehensive school, Cricklewood
As the headteacher of a rare institution - a true comprehensive school in an inner city area, with a similar deprived intake to Abbeydale Grange but with the middle class element still present - I agree with Nick Davies's analysis of the true causes of underachievement: class, poverty and a highly-refined selective system in urban areas, with overt and covert selection exacerbated by parental pressure.
Profound structural changes are the only long-term answer - changing the goalposts, transforming the nature of learning institutions, focusing far more on a skills-based curriculum and so on.
But the first priority for this government must be to target funding support - say £3bn - for the most vulnerable young people. These are the school refusers, the coerced attenders, the alienated, the depressed. These youngsters have nothing and have nothing to lose. They cannot buy in to our society and seek solace in withdrawal or lawlessness.
The second priority must be the recruitment and retention of teachers. At best teaching is a learning profession with lead learners who make a profound difference to the climate of achievement for all. Injecting £2bn into time and resources for professional education would transform many school communities and provide the government with ideal recruitment centres. Already, in my school, we send a steady stream of sixth formers and other staff into teacher training. Advocacy schools, where we show that teaching can be an uplifting, exciting and cooperative venture, could turn the tide.
Doug McAvoy, general secretary, National Union of Teachers
If there is a magic formula which addresses all the factors impacting on education it must include additional resources. But money only buys the services and support needed to alleviate the problems faced by teachers. It cannot guarantee total success.
An allocation of £5bn to education would indeed help. Although money isn't the entire answer, research shows it is a significant part. The other part is for government to go in for joined-up thinking, not piecemeal approaches.
Excellence in the Cities, for example, targets educational disadvantage, but only in seven conurbations. Education action zones encourage innovation but are hung up on the politics of private investment.
Teachers are the single most important resource but research shows young people reject teaching as a career because of the workload, the stress, the lack of recognition, pupil behaviour and the poor salaries. Yet we need more teachers to overcome these disincentives and to promote children's education.
Smaller classes allow teachers time to deal with individual pupils - time to help the child who is struggling and stretch the more able child. But the government is limiting class sizes only in the early years of primary education. It should extend this to all classes at a cost of £1.24bn.
The excessive workload could be eased by giving teachers support time during the school day. Liaising with outside agencies, developing extra support for pupils and more could be achieved if this time was available. Freeing teachers from classroom responsibilities for around four hours a week would cost £1.21 billion.
Teachers need additional specialist help from outside the school. Sadly these services have been decimated by years of cuts and are only slowly being revived. Their help comes in many forms: support for children with learning difficulties, with emotional and behavioural difficulties, psychological needs and much more. An injection of £1.1bn would go a long way to re-establishing these services.
Sufficient numbers of high quality graduates must be dissuaded from going into other employment. This requires a significant reduction in the comparability gap by an immediate 12% pay rise.
Theresa May MP, shadow secretary of state for education and employment
Before David Blunkett looks at his education budget for the future, he should take a long hard look at what he is doing today in the funding of education.
Too much being spent on bureaucracy, too much being held back at the centre, too much being spent on the government's priorities rather than what schools feel they need at local level - these are the concerns I hear from teachers and governors as I visit schools.
Bureaucracy not only takes up valuable funds that schools feel could be better spent elsewhere, it also takes time and effort away from the classroom.
Too much of the money that is held back at the centre to go into projects decided in Whitehall has been allocated on the basis of an expensive bidding process. This process not only costs money in itself but also takes time and effort, and hence resources, out of the classroom. We have been pressing the government to cut back on the amount of money subject to the bidding process and I welcome the government's recent apparent move in the right direction on this.
But yesterday's announcement about the standards fund does nothing to assuage the concern that there is too much control by Whitehall bureaucrats and not enough freedom at school level to determine how money should be spent.
The government should get more money into the schools for them to decide their own priorities and their local needs.
Tim Brighouse, chief education officer, Birmingham education authority
There is so much urgently needed in heavily urbanised areas where the smog of ignorance and despair can be thickest. So an extension of Excellence in the Cities which is such a fillip to those working in the selected areas has to be the first item on my wish list.
Secondly, throughout the primary age range and in the first year of secondary schooling, let every teacher work in tandem with a "learning assistant". Two pairs of eyes are much more effective than one.
Thirdly, let's have a first-time parent service from birth to three. This will require the creation of a job filled by people chosen for their qualities rather than qualifications. This should be based on the health clinic rather than the school and pick up the baton from the health visitor. But it needs to be universal - if it must be prioritised make it for teenage parents.
Fourthly, I'd encourage teachers who contributed with extra tax relief to take their own planned sabbatical so they could provide living examples of lifelong learning. Piloting such schemes for those in urban areas where the challenges presented and the energy required are formidable would be a powerful boost to those under greatest pressure to achieve a transformation in education standards.
I have hardly started and £10bn has gone already.
