1Why Education Matters
All the major political parties vying for voters’ support in Britain today
would seek to assure the electorate that one of the primary objectives of
their education policies is the raising of standards in all the country’s
institutions providing education for the young. Indeed, it is hard to see
how they could hope to ally themselves with the wishes of parents (and,
indeed, of all voters) if they said anything different since, according to
the famous dictum of the great Socialist historian and political thinker
R.H. Tawney, to be found in his 1931 classic work Equality: ‘What a
wise parent would desire for his [sic] own children, so a nation, in so far
as it is wise, must desire for all children’ (Tawney, 1931: 146).
Naturally, all our political parties would wish to see ‘wisdom’ as one of
their most significant and enduring contributions to political and educa-
tional discourse.
Before he was first elected Prime Minister in May 1997, Tony Blair
was proud to announce (several times) that ‘education, education,
education’ would be the top three priorities of a New Labour adminis-
tration. The DfEE White Paper, Excellence in Schools, published in July
1997 just 67 days after the General Election, declared its ‘core commit-
ment’ to achieving ‘high standards for all’, argued forcibly that all
schools would be expected to ‘take responsibility for raising their own
standards’ and pledged that ‘standards of performance in all schools’
would indeed be ‘higher by the year 2002’ (DfEE, 1997: 3, 13, 14). The
emphasis throughout this first White Paper was on the key principle that
‘standards matter more than structures’, an oft-repeated mantra that first
saw the light of day in a highly influential 1996 book co-authored by
Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle with the title, The Blair Revolution:
Can New Labour Deliver? There it was argued that ‘the first priority of
a new government must be to raise general educational standards . . .
New Labour believes that, throughout schooling, standards are more
important than structures . . . Under a New Labour government, there
will be zero tolerance of failure’ (Mandelson and Liddle, 1996: 92).
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The Labour Party Manifesto for the June 2001 General Election,
Ambitions for Britain, listed as one of the Party’s ten goals for the year
2010: ‘Expanded higher education as we raise standards in our
secondary schools’. The Manifesto went on to argue that, since 1997,
rising standards had already been achieved – particularly in the primary
sector – through ‘major new investment and significant reforms’; but
there was still much more to be done. The ‘dramatic advances at primary
level’ meant that pupils would increasingly arrive at secondary school
‘demanding the best’. A second Labour administration would
‘modernise the whole secondary curriculum to promote higher standards
and better progression from school and college to university or work-
based training’ (Labour Party, 2001: 3, 18). In a comparatively brief
section on education, the Conservative Party’s 2001 Election Manifesto,
Time for Common Sense, announced that: ‘Our objective is to give
parents choice and headteachers freedom . . . These reforms will lead to
schools of the sort parents want – schools with higher standards, schools
which have their own traditions, a distinct ethos and where children
wear their school uniform with pride’ (Conservative Party, 2001: 8). In
the view of the Liberal Democrat 2001 Manifesto, Freedom, Justice,
Honesty, the whole purpose of government intervention in education
matters was to raise standards; and a sine qua non of improved standards
was the proper funding of schools and colleges with the appointment of
more teachers ‘to make a real difference to class sizes’ (Liberal
Democrats, 2001: 4).
The DfEE Green Paper, Schools: Building on Success, published in
February 2001, boasted the sub-title Raising Standards, Promoting
Diversity, Achieving Results, thereby conveying the clear message that
all these processes were synonymous and were to be pursued simultane-
ously. The Green Paper reiterated the Labour Government’s theme of
building on the progress already made in primary and early years provi-
sion by launching a new ‘standards drive’ in the early secondary years
with ‘ambitious new targets for performance in tests for 14-year-olds in
English, mathematics, science and ICT [information and communica-
tions technology]’ (DfEE, 2001: 7). Then the third chapter of the newly-
re-elected Blair administration’s first education White Paper, Schools
Achieving Success, published in September 2001, had the title,
Achieving High Standards for All – Supporting Teaching and Learning.
Here it was argued right at the outset that the Labour Government’s
education agenda was driven by ‘a belief in the need to raise standards’.
The key to ‘raising standards’ was said to be ‘the quality of teaching and
learning in the classroom’; but this was by no means the whole story.
2 Education Policy in Britain