KIRKLEES Council leader Clr Robert Light has delivered a damning report on schools in his own authority.

Clr Light said education in the district was failing to make the grade.

The council is drawing up plans for a £400m investment in schools as part of the national Building Schools for the Future programme.

Clr Light, a councillor for Birstall and Birkenshaw ward, said Kirklees children were flocking to schools elsewhere.

He revealed he sent his own son to a school outside Kirklees because the options were not up to scratch.

He said: “We are under-performing against the national average when we should be over-performing.

“I want a situation where every parent is happy to send their child to their local school.

“At the moment, 1,500 children leave the borough every day to go to school. That’s not right.

“If we don’t achieve a different type of learning system as a result of Schools for the Future, the whole thing will be a waste of time.”

Clr Light lives with his family in Birkenshaw.

The closest Kirklees school is Whitcliffe Mount Business and Enterprise College, Cleckheaton.

But he sent son Matthew, now 16, to Bradford school Dixons City Academy.

He said he would consider doing the same for daughters Jessica, 10, and Rebecca, four, if improvements were not made.

He said: “I wasn’t leader at the time we were looking for schools for Matthew, but it was the right judgement.

“In Kirklees we still don’t have the standard of schools that we should.

“When we were looking at schools five years ago, we wanted a small high school with good academic standards and that wasn’t available in Kirklees.

“Dixons is a mixed ability school, with an emphasis on its children, excellent specialist sports, arts and IT facilities and brilliant pastoral support.

“That is lost in the big schools and that’s where they are going wrong at Whitcliffe.

“Big schools fail pupils.”

Among the changes proposed by the Schools for the Future plan is the closure of single sex schools.

That would see the end of Batley Boys’ High School and Batley Girls’ School.

Clr Light said 880 pupils from Birstall and Batley were going outside the authority for schooling because they wanted co-education.

He added: “We are lucky because Dixons works for us and we had that option. No parent would refuse that option if they had it.

“We need the right system to ensure that our children are getting the best education.”

Clr Jim Dodds, the council’s cabinet member for children’s services, said: “It’s not right that so many children are going outside the borough to go to school.

“It’s my vision that when we do Building Schools for the Future, parents look no further than their local school.”