Including the socially excluded: League tables and Labour's schools policy (original) (raw)

In the autumn before he was elected prime minister, Tony Blair, in a fit of possibly misplaced hubris, announced that his party would have a thousand days to prepare for the next thousand years. In the event it was only 974 days from the election to the millennium, but who could possibly be pedantic when the stakes were that high? Of course Blair was only being rhetorical with the truth, but the message his pronouncement contained, that of hope for the future after eighteen years of Tory misrule, lay at the heart of Labour's electoral appeal. Things, we were promised on that glorious night in May, could only get better. Yet, speaking from the other side of the millennium divide, one thousand days into a Labour administration, we have to ask whether or not they have. Although it is the health service that has arguably received the most attention when considering Labour's record, education is perhaps a better place to start. For education, education, education, as Tony Blair's inelegant use of the Ciceronian triad put it, was the top priority. That and joined-up government, a theme to which we shall return. To be fair, the Labour party did inherit a parlous state of affairs. True, exam results had been steadily rising under the Tories, but everything else had fallen; in particular, teachers' salaries and the overall expenditure on schools. This left Labour with a demoralised profession teaching large classes in crumbling school buildings. Perhaps Labour's biggest challenge, however, was to tackle the legacy of the Conservatives' drive to transform education into a marketplace. The Conservatives' essential premise was that, as with business, competition between schools would drive up standards. The economic indicators of success were to be exam results. For the first time, a stock exchange of school performance, the so-called league tables, were to be published to enable parents to trade their children against a school's future success. In the event it was shrewd investors and schools already rich in