However, they will be required to demonstrate the measures they have taken to widen access to poorer students before they are allowed to charge top-up fees of up to £3,000 a year from 2006.Professor Schwartz will now consult schools and universities on his proposals and publish a final report later this year.. “About half of the predictions are wrong, so it’s almost a coin-toss,” he said.Many poorer students lacked the confidence to apply to a top university but might do so if they knew they already had the grades required for the course, he added.He also called for better training for admissions tutors, warning that interviews were often conducted by academics who were given the jobs on top of their other duties.Universities will not be forced to adopt the recommendations. Many of these extra tests are a drain on applicants’ time and money and can deter many working-class students from applying, he argued.The taskforce welcomed proposals for a trial of an English version of the SAT, saying that the results of initial experiments were “promising”.Professor Schwartz also called for a massive shake-up of the admissions process so that students could apply for degree courses after they received their A-level results, rather than the current system of predicted grades. No group of students should have an automatic advantage but tutors could use the information to lower candidates’ A-level entry requirements if they believed they deserved special consideration.The taskforce also called for an American-style aptitude test to be used alongside A-levels to identify bright students who had the potential to succeed despite having low exam results because of their poor schooling.Using one national aptitude exam – like the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) which is used by universities across the US – would be better than the growing number of “bespoke” tests that most elite universities are now using, Professor Schwartz said. The Government publishes league tables of pupils’ performance in national curriculum tests for 11- and 14-year-olds as well as those for GCSE and A-level results.. Universities should be allowed to offer places to state school students with lower A-level grades than their privately educated rivals, the Government’s admissions taskforce said yesterday. Listen to this from the venerable Peter Paterson, writing about ITV’s Life Begins for the Daily Mail: “I imagine many viewers must have switched off by the first commercial break.”Everybody can make mistakes.

As a result, they fail to take them as seriously enough, Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of the 140,000-strong Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said at the opening of her union’s annual conference in Bournemouth.
She said union research showed that children enjoyed school lessand less through primary and secondary school because of the constant testing. During their school careers, youngsters will have sat more than 100 national tests – far more than any other country, she said. They were being denied their rights to a broad and balanced school curriculum because teachers felt under pressure to “teach to the test” and “protect their school’s ranking in league tables”.The union debates a motion this week to ballot its members on banning co-operation with league tables – by refusing to supply the information necessary to the Government to complete them. Pupils are “punch drunk” with testing by the time they sit GCSE exams, a teachers’ leader said yesterday. There are those who allege that the very idea of choice, giving people a greater say in the services they receive and the diversity of provision that goes along with such an approach must drive inequality of provision and of outcome.”They are wrong …”. It needs to be made available to all as part of a modern agenda of redistribution which includes choice and opportunity.”Mr Byers will call for wide ranging reform of school admissions, arguing that restrictions on pupil numbers, surplus places and school opening times should be relaxed to increase parental choice.

He will also seek greater flexibility in the school curriculum to allow education to be tailored to the needs of individual children.Tony Blair has made choice a centrepiece of planning for the next wave of public sector reform. but Mr Byers will call on ministers to go further still and attack critics who claim that increasing diversity in public services leads to a two-tier system.Mr Byers will say: “The Government has taken the first, often tentative steps on the path to a choice-based system of public service provision but it must now go much further. Choice must not be denied but its scope and scale needs to be expanded if we are to secure social justice At present choice is available to those who can afford it. He also proposed a new tier of personal advisers, modelled on advice staff in Job Centres, to provide people with information about how to make the right choices.He will say: “The forces of opposition to choice in our public services are gathering They must be resisted. Parents should be given the power to sack headteachers and governors at failing schools under radical proposals to be outlined today by Stephen Byers,the Blairite former cabinet minister .
In a speech to a left-of-centre think tank the former secretary of state for transport, who also served as school standards minister, will say that some education authority powers should be transferred to parents, effectively allowing them to give a vote of no-confidence in senior teachers.Mr Byers, who has become an outrider for radical Blairite thinking, will also call for residents dissatisfied with rubbish collection, street cleaning or other public services to be given the choice of a new contractor.

A spokeswoman for the BBC said the corporation would put in place procedures to prevent any conflicts before Mr Grade took up the job on 17 May.. Last week, after his BBC appointment, Mr Grade described as “preposterous” the idea that the board of governors would deal with issues relating to booking studios. Mr Foster said any artificial mechanism put in place by the BBC to tackle conflicts of interest would fail to take into account the “human reaction” of an individual BBC producer trying to decide whether to film a programme at Pinewood, knowing it was chaired by the BBC’s chairman.Pinewood does not make programmes itself but provides one of the biggest facilities in the world for the production of films and television shows. He has got to remove himself from any way of influencing Pinewood’s dealings with the BBC.” Mr Foster added that it was “reasonable” for Mr Grade to benefit from the Pinewood flotation, by placing his shares in a blind trust, but he must not be able to influence the company as a director or shareholder.