Labour's education policies are spelled out in the new White Paper Opening the Doors to a Learning Society. Out goes the prescriptive National Curriculum, to be replaced by a common curriculum framework.
Out go league tables based on national testing. Opted-out schools and new City Technology Colleges will be brought back into the LEA system. These and other reforms will be widely welcomed by teachers and parents as an improvement on unpopular Tory policies.
But Labour's reforming zeal is a pale shadow of the Tories'. The fundamental feature of our education system is that it is much better at reproducing social inequality than reducing it.
This is the acid test for Labour: will it produce policies which do as much for working class children and students as the Tories have done for a privileged minority?
The White Paper is full of the rhetoric of overcoming disadvantage and fulfilling every child's potential, but the remedies aren't radical enough to achieve it.
Labour's White Paper is trapped in the dilemma of trying to serve two masters - the demands of working class parents and students for an education system that works for them, and the demands of business for an education system that delivers a profitable workforces.
'Opportunity'
Labour's document constructs a post-Fordist fantasy. It begins, "A whole series of changes - economic, technological and cultural - has presented us with the opportunity of building a genuinely learning society - a society in which all individuals can fulfil their potential as active citizens in a prosperous, civilised and caring community".
Note that these changes have already occurred - in other words, Labour's vision of citizen and community is based on the existing economic order.
This scenario, which promises that economic success goes hand-in-hand with social justice, is crucial to Labour's perspectives for education.
Modern capitalism, it claims, requires all workers to be highly educated, and that will provide the motivation which the White paper sees as the key factor in working class achievement in education.
This is a castle built on sand. In reality, new economic order combines high skill jobs for some with low-skill jobs for many, plus permanent high unemployment, all shaped by gender and ethnic inequalities. An education system geared to this economic order will continue to reflect those inequalities and demotivate many working class students.
It is the acceptance of the logic of capital - not just pre-election caution - which explains the absence of resource commitments in the White Paper.
Nursery education is also to be expanded, but only for halftime provision for three and
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 69, September 24 1994, Page 6