LABOUR's manifesto pledges on education included the unequivocal commitment that every child would be treated as an individual with individual needs and individual aspirations. The Tories, they tried to argue, had become obsessed with meaningless quantitative analysis which bore no relation to the educational challenges of raising standards in our schools.

Now, just over a year after taking office, we are told that parents' educational performance, achievements, and qualifications - mostly relating to the 1970s and 80s - are to be used in assessing classroom targets for their children aged 12 to 18.

This hare-brained scheme has already been rejected as unreliable by Government education advisers, but is now being resurrected in pilot project form by education chiefs in Edinburgh, where its principal proponent is Councillor Elizabeth Maginnis.

Her hope, it has been reported today, is that if the Edinburgh trial proved a success, the Scottish Office would come back to it and introduce it nationally. In addition to being education convener on Edinburgh Council, of course, she holds the influential position of education spokeswoman for the Labour-dominated Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, as well as being a member of the Scottish Office working party on targets.

How dare Labour suggest then that there is necessarily any link between the parents' educational qualifications and the appropriate targets for their children in today's schools (two decades on), or that they would provide valid indicators about a child's progress?

It begs the question what would happen in the case of the child who was the product, for example, of parents of whom one was a high-flying first-class Wrangler from the Cambridge Tripos, and the other someone who had no O-levels/grades at all!

Elizabeth J Smith,

Scottish Conservative

Spokesman on Education,

14 Links Place, Edinburgh.

June 1.