PLANS for a new high school and major improvements to others across the borough have been scrapped after the coalition government pulled its funding.

The new high school was to be built on the Old GlaxoSmithKline Leisure Club, in Oldfield lane North, Greenford, which the council bought off the pharmaceutical company last summer.

And another 17 secondary and special schools in Ealing were to be overhauled with many receiving major refurbishment work, 15 of them were to gain from new computer equipment.

All work would have been completed by 2014, but Education secretary Michael Gove pulled the plug on the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme on Monday - a scheme which had been in the pipeline since 2004.

The borough will no longer see the promised £300m investment, £12m of it coming from schools and the council.

Mr Gove said the drastic cuts were necessary given the economic climate and education funding had to be prioritised towards teachers rather than bureaucratic capital spending. There may still be some future capital spending on schools, to be decided after an autum spending review, but it is likely to be nowhere near the scale of BSF.

Council leader Julian Bell said: "This decision is a devastating blow to our plans to transform schools across the borough and give our young people the education they deserve.

"We have a growing population and are in desperate need of more school places, particularly for children with special educational needs.

"Through the BSF programme we expected to have built classrooms for more than 3,000 extra high school pupils by 2014.

"Without this vital investment we could see a generation condemned to being educated in ill-equipped and overcrowded temporary classrooms."

Nick Grant, Ealing secretary of the National Union of Teachers, added: "We don't believe the hype that teachers are more important than buildings. Both are essential to good learning.

"The dual pressure of crumbling, leaky infrastructure and rapidly rising pupil numbers in our schools ought to mean a significant rise education spending right now."

Only two high schools have a chance of the work still going ahead. Cardinal Wiseman, in Greenford, which was to be remodelled with an extension, and Dormers Wells, in Southall, which was to be completely rebuilt. They were 'sample schools' chosen to spearhead the developments. The Department of Education will decide in the next few weeks whether to allow the plans, which was due to start by September, to go ahead.

Mr Gove added: "In the light of the public finances, it would have been irresponsible to carry on regardless with an inflexible and needlessly complex programme.

"Our first priority is raising the attainment of the poorest by investing in great teaching."

The cash injection for Ealing's schools was part of a national BSF scheme, to be carried out over 15 to 20 years, costing about £45bn.

Ealing North MP Stephen Pound said: "the government to simply cancel essential improvement works at so many schools is not only dashing the cup of hope from the lips of Ealing pupils but will have an absolutely disastrous effect on the construction industry at a time when help is needed.

"Above all the cancellation of the proposed new High School in north Greenford means despair for hundreds of pupils and the inevitability of there being more than a thousand students without a high school by 2014.

"This is just plain madness and for the Conservative/Liberal Democrat government to fall back on the tired old excuse that it is all the fault of the global recession and Labour's actions simply won't wash any more."