He was speaking at a special dinner debate focusing on the extended schools agenda, organised by procurement and fulfilment company The Consortium.

The event was held in Birmingham and attended by a number of key primary and secondary head teachers and local authority representatives.

The Consortium was represented at the event by chief executive Melanie Teal and marketing director, Brian Potter.

It followed Gordon Brown’s recent Budget, which reaffirmed the Government’s commitment to ensuring that all schools should be “extended” by 2010 – and at a time when the “personalisation” and “every child matters” agendas are becoming increasingly important and schools are being encouraged to group together in clusters and federations.

“It is only in the last ten-15 years that we have begun to see truly world-class results in our schools,” Mick Brookes told the gathering.

“There are some remarkable things happening in education but nonetheless it will take a long time to convince the many excluded communities around the country that education is for them. In many cases this attitude has persisted over several generations so in that sense we are at the start of a new dawn.

“Of course there are still considerable negatives for us all to contend with. For example, funding can be poured into an excluded community and great things achieved, only for the heart to be ripped out of that community when the annual league tables are published. Then there is an Ofsted system which is still punitive and which for many schools, can feel like the Sword of Damocles.”

Linda Heaven-Woolley, head teacher at Broadoak Maths and Computing College College in Weston-super-Mare, said she believed the current schools environment to be “the most pressurised but most enjoyable” for several decades.

Mrs Heaven-Woolley added that despite increasing demands on schools, there was “much to celebrate.”

And referring to a recent study which found that Government initiatives have added 58 new responsibilities to head teachers’ job descriptions, she said there could be no doubt that workloads had never been heavier, although this should be balanced against the £45 billion “Building Schools for the Future” programme, which was improving the schools environment across the country.

“This is the most exciting time of my career in education and I have waited 36 years to see this kind of philosophical thrust,” said Mrs Heaven-Woolley.

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