A FAILURE to improve local schools has seen Oxfordshire County Council demoted to a three-star authority.

The lack of progress in Oxfordshire's state schools was spelt out by the Audit Commission, which decided to strip County Hall of one of its ranking stars.

The Audit Commission made clear that the performance of schools was the reason for the council's slip. It means Oxfordshire was one of just two council to drop a star out of 19 assessed in the South East.

Oxfordshire is now at the bottom of league tables comparing exam and test results with similarly affluent counties.

County council leader Keith Mitchell said: "Educational attainment is vital for our children and we were conscious before this inspection that many Oxfordshire schools are not yet doing well enough.

"My two feelings are disappointment that we have not done better on the attainment issue and determination to improve our performance for our children and get our star back double quick. This is an affluent county with a skilled and well-educated adult population. Yet for complex reasons the current level of attainment in our schools does not match this."

The commission's district auditor, Maria Grindley, said Oxfordshire schools' poor exam results had ultimately overshadowed the council's achievements in other areas.

She said: "It is fair to say there have been improvements in many areas. But it is the issue of examinations and educational attainment that has affected its star rating."

The council chief executive, Joanna Simons, told councillors: "We know that this will come as a shock to many staff and it will be hard to understand why we have gone down.

"The reason our performance assessment score has dropped relates to our rating for children's services, which has gone down from three to two. This is largely due to school exam results. Although we are in line with the national average, they just aren't good enough for Oxfordshire."

The county's new director of education Janet Tomlinson last week blamed complacency in secondary schools for the failure to bring about improvements.

She feared that some heads were in denial about consistently disappointing GCSE results, adding that children had a better chance of acquiring a good GCSE result in Slough than Oxfordshire.

Her assessment was welcomed by Open University professor of education Bob Moon, who says he expressed similar concerns about standards in Oxfordshire two years ago.

Mr Moon, a former head of Peers School, Littlemore, said that many Oxfordshire's youngsters were "getting a poor deal", with schools still reluctant to embrace changes that have been shown to work outside the county.

He said: "Oxfordshire's new education chief is to be commended for criticising complacent secondary schools. Nearly two years ago the former Oxfordshire chief education officer, Tim Brighouse, and I made the same point in a letter to The Oxford Times."

He believes the key issue of why Oxfordshire's improvement was slower than in other similar education authorities has still not been properly addressed. He insisted that the measures to bring about better exam results were "not rocket science".

Mr Moon, who still lives in central Oxford, sets out ten recommendations on this week's education page in the Weekend section of The Oxford Times. He said the recommendations could improve results by five per cent in each of the next five years.

He said every school should already have computerised systems in place to monitor the progress of pupils approaching GCSE.

The Peers head from 1982 to 1988 is also calling for the abolition of study leave and more advice to parents on the organisation of revision.

He writes: "One headteacher is reported in The Oxford Times as saying that changes take up to five years. But there is now plenty of experience to show co-ordinated changes can work much more quickly."

But he said County Hall was also partly to blame by failing to monitor closely enough what was happening in schools.