Gordon Brown pledged to make Britain’s education system the “best in the world” yesterday, with billions of pounds of extra funding for children’s centres, schools, colleges and universities and more investment in vocational skills and science.

The measures, derided last night by the Conservatives as “misleading spin”, are driven largely by the need to overcome Britain’s desperate skills shortage.

With five million functionally illiterate adults and 17 million struggling with numbers, Britain lags far behind competitors in basic skills and needs to catch up to compete effectively with the developing economic giants of China and India.

Another motivation for the reforms is the Chancellor’s pledge to end child poverty by 2020. Boosting the educational performance of the most disadvantaged children at an early age will be vital to hitting this target. So the Chancellor has promised to provide extra support for six-year-olds struggling with reading by extending the Every Child a Reader scheme from 2,500 children a year to 30,000.

The programme, which provides one-to-one reading tuition for children for half an hour every day over 12 to 20 weeks, helps children aged 5 years and 9 months to 6 years and 3 months, which is believed to be the crucial age range for establishing most children’s reading skills.

Schools will also get a rise in direct payments from the Government, from £39,000 to £50,000 for a typical primary school and from £150,000 to £200,000 for a secondary.

Children’s rights campaigners are hoping that head teachers will use this money to to give the most disadvantaged the opportunity to develop social and emotional skills through extended schools programmes, such as after-school arts and sports clubs.

In secondary schools, where the learning gap between boys and girls is greatest, Mr Brown has promised £130 million of extra support for mentoring, small-group tutoring and personalised learning to help to reduce the gender divide.

The promise of a massive capital investment in schools, worth £36 billion by 2011, aims to refurbish or build 12,000 schools, half of all primaries and 90 per cent of secondaries.

Most of this money, about £8 billion a year for schools up to 2010-11, was announced in March. What is new is the extra £2 billion a year to be spent by the end of the decade on improving the infrastructure of other educational establishments. Mr Brown is aiming to rebuild 100 colleges and create 3,500 children’s centres.

As part of a campaign to improve adult learning, the Chancellor has asked Sir Digby Jones, the former CBI Director-General, to be a bridge between employers and education providers, ensuring that training and education are tailored to employers’ needs.

Universities will be given £60 million a year for research with commercial potential. The number of apprenticeships on offer should double to 500,000 and the Train to Gain scheme of in-work training will be extended from 100,000 places to 350,000 a year by 2011.

The Tories said that capital investment was about to fall and adde that the increased direct payments to schools were for one year only.

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