How New Labour Influence Future Education

“Education, education, education”; Tony Blair identified that these were his key priorities when he came into office in 1997, aiming to raise standards and update the education system to fit a modern and thriving society (BBC News; 2007). This assessment will identify how New Labour’s policies emerged and how the policies they adopted influenced future education. This essay will further analyse any shortcomings in these policies and recommend changes that could have been made to make them more effective.
New Labour was set up as a fresh new take on the Labour Party in 1997 during the election; this name was maintained when Blair was in office. In 1996 the slogan ‘New Labour, New life for Britain’ was released, to show the modernisation of
(Gillard, 2002, pp. 5-10). New Labour was committed to minimise class sizes for 5-7 year olds to 30 children; so children can have more one to one support. As the number of children decreased, a larger amount of teachers and support staff were employed to balance the ratio. At the lowest there was only 22 children to a teacher; which shows the larger amount of staff employed (Heath et al., 2014, pp. 4-6). However, no party has been committed to introducing statutory requirements, ‘in 2011 the number of classes having over 30 pupils per class was 1,370; from a total of 54,790 classes surveyed’ (Politics.co.uk, 2015). From those figures it suggests, that smaller class sizes have a positive impact on attainment and behavior in the early stages of a child’s education. This shows that a key area of improvement for New Labour would be to implement smaller class sizes; to ensure children get more one to one support in the classroom. However, in 2015, this is not the case as many classes in council funded primary schools have more than 35 children a class; this means that some children do not get the support they need. (Politics.co.uk,
It is suggested when constructing league tables that test results were used from school, so incentives were in place to make sure schools were seen in a positive light. This may undermine the real level of achievement and shows that results may have be exaggerated to show schools more favourably (Heath et al., 2014, pp. 6-8).
New Labour provided funding for repairing and building new schools ‘by 2010 there was 150 new schools and 450 planned to be built’ (Lupton and Obolenskaya 2013, p. 24). ICT is the future, although many teachers are doubtful when using ICT, as many classrooms still do not have the latest computers; this means that ICT is limited. This is such a shame as ICT enables children to have a hands on experience, e.g. by doing activities on an interactive whiteboard; to enhance their learning experience (Lupton and Obolenskaya 2013, p.