A hard-hitting 15-point plan aimed at driving up education standards across Bradford got the green light last night.

Bradford Council’s children’s services overview and scrutiny committee approved the recommendations that will now go before education bosses.

The recommendations, as revealed by the Telegraph & Argus last Thursday, included setting up a pool of high-quality supply teachers, giving English language lessons to some parents and making sure the right people are sitting on schools’ governing bodies.

Some minor changes were made to details within the recommendations, including an addition to recommendation nine that more prominence is given to play by primary schools and also that they look at ways to improve numeracy as well as oracy.

Scrutiny committee chairman Councillor Malcolm Sykes said last night: “With these amendments, the committee recommends the report be endorsed in full.

“The expectation will be that this report will go to the Executive, who will ask for an action plan around these recommendations and it will then come back to us in due course.”

Coun Ralph Berry, executive member for education at the Council, said: “This is one of the best pieces of work this Council has done on scrutiny.

“It will show schools and the education community that we have got it, that we understand the dilemmas we face and are ready to tackle them.”

Despite improvements, especially to Ofsted inspection scores, Bradford’s primary schools this year recorded the third-worst key stage two SATs results in England, while GCSE and A-level results remain in the lowest 20 per cent nationally.

Members of the scrutiny committee flagged up that they believed some of the recommendations were no longer relevant.

But Coun Sykes said it was not the committee’s job to remove them from the report, but he would expect the executive to strike them off the list if they were satisfied the issues were no longer a problem.

The committee also praised a recently-introduced entitlement to free early education for eligible two-year-olds.

Coun Sykes said: “It is a success story. It looks as though we are making progress.”