EDUCATION POLICY UNDER NEW LABOUR

Education Policy Making Under New Labour



Education Policy Making Under New Labour

Introduction

According to various studies one of the best predictors of educational success and attainment is socioeconomic status. Children whose families are in middle and upper socioeconomic brackets are more likely to perform better in school and to complete more years of education than children from lower socioeconomic class families (Beck, 2008, 160). Using father's education as a proxy for socioeconomic status, global statistics indicate that students are significantly more likely to attend college if their fathers graduated from college-more than twice as likely in Austria, Germany, France, and England.

Socioeconomic status also predicts academic achievement. On standardized tests such as the SAT and the ACT, “children from the lowest-income families have the lowest average test scores, with an incremental rise in family income associated with a rise in test scores”. It is reported that students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to enrol in advanced courses for mathematics credit and to graduate from high-school indicators of future educational and occupational success. In addition, compared with low-income students, high-income students are six times more likely to graduate with a bachelor's degree in live years. Moreover of top-tier colleges and universities, less than 3 percent of enrolled students come from the lowest socioeconomic group.

Although people seem to believe that socioeconomic status plays a robust role for educational success but the facts are opposite. There are myriad nations of the world which has received immense educational progress with income inequalities.

The belief that there is a relation between socioeconomic status and performance inclined people to criticize the educational reforms by New Labours. When New Labour came to power in 1997, it continued the steady march of educational reform set in motion by 18 years of Conservative administration (Chan, 2010, 39)

Discussion

Families with low incomes have fewer resources to commit to educational purposes-less money to buy books or computers or to pay for tutors. Disadvantaged parents are less involved in learning activities. As parental education and income levels increase, the likelihood of a parent taking a child to a library, play, concert or other live show, art gallery, museum, or historical site also increases. Further, parents who have less education and lower income levels are less likely to be involved in school-related activities, for example, attending a school event or volunteering at a school (Haugen, 2009, 202).

The second reason why racial and ethnic minorities do not perform well in school, and compounding the difficulty ELL students have, is that many of the tests used to assess academic achievement and ability are biased against minorities. Questions on standardized tests often require students to have knowledge that is specific to the white middle-class majority culture, knowledge that racial and ethnic minorities may not have.

A third factor that hinders minority students' academic achievement is overt racism and discrimination. Discrimination against minority students takes the form of unequal funding, as discussed earlier, as well as racial profiling and school ...