New Labour Responsibility

1350 Words3 Pages

New Labour and Education: Opportunity and Responsibility within Continuities New Labour, under the leadership of Tony Blair, proposed the ‘Third Way’ which claims to be different from both the old left and the new right. This essay will argue that the educational reform based on the ‘Third Way’ considerably differs from the old labour in regard to linking the value of ‘opportunity’ and ‘responsibility’ with continuous marketisation of education. The essay will examine New Labour considered the welfare reform as one of the priorities in policy tasks during the 1997 manifesto and after coming to power on May 1, 1997. The newly proposed idea of the ‘Third Way’, which declares to be distinguishable from both the Conservatives and the …show more content…

Although little agreement remains on the details of the third way, ‘opportunity’ and ‘responsibility’ are commonly suggested as its core values. New Labour’s pursuit of equality of opportunities is clearly distinctive from the old labour’s goal of equality of outcomes. Rather than traditional distributive goals of old labour achieved by income redistribution and wage policy, New Labour pursued to redistribute the primary endowments of skills and jobs by ensuring people the right to education, training, and support. Yet in a sense, this pursuit means New Labour accepts growing inequalities inherited from the Conservative government as the status-quo of society, which seems to contrast to the egalitarianism of the old …show more content…

New Labour has claimed that “the monolithic comprehensive schools that take no account of children’s differing abilities” cannot provide equality of opportunity for all. Therefore, it has come up with a way to ensure the status of grant-maintained schools which has enjoyed privileged funding and admission and has been supported by the aggressive push of the previous Conservative government. First proposed in the 1995 white paper Diversity and Excellence: A New Partnership for Schools and implemented by the 1998 School Standards and Framework Act, all state schools were to be replaced by three types of schools – community, aided, and foundation schools. This restructuring made possible for grant-maintained schools to opt out for the foundation status, enabling them to continue their advantaged

Open Document