It is vital to Britain’s economic recovery and standard of living that the performance of the manufacturing industry is improved and that education’s the whole range of government policies, including education, contribute as much as possible to improving industrial performance and thereby increasing the national wealth.
(Quoted in Finn 1987)
In the rising unemployment and the apparent decline of Britain’s economy, the concern was that education was failing to produce appropriately skilled and motivated young workers. The social democratic view of education-that it should promote equality of opportunity, was deemed less important than the needs of the industry. This emphasis, and the policies that followed from it, have become known as the New Vocationalisim.
Despite the fact that the ‘Great Debate’ initiated by a Labour Prime Minister, it was in tune with some of the thinking of the New Right and the Conservative governments after 1979. Although the latter rejected the social engineering implied in the idea that education cold be used to make society more egalitarian, they also did think that education could promote the social changes that they wanted to see. In particular, the New Right argued that education should be largely concerned with promoting economic growth, by concentrating the skills of the work force.
Some employers said that the education system was failing to meet their needs, and the New right believed that unemployment was rising because more people leaving school were becoming more unemployable. However the objectives were not achieves by just simply ‘throwing money at the problem’. For as Dan Finn says, the New Right saw a ‘bloated public sector which was strangling the wealth-creating element of economy’(1987).
In the first year of the Thatcher government education expenditure was cut by 3.5% and changes designed to overcome the supposed deficiencies of social democratic policies began to be made.
If the overall aim of the New Right policies was to use education to promote growth in the economic society, the way in which this would be achieved would be by encouraging competition, increasing choice(especially parental choice), with an emphasis on raising standards. At the same time the education system would be made more efficient, by eliminating waste and saving the tax payers money. These aims were made very clear in the handbook Britain 1993, published by HMSO(her majesty’s stationary office). This described the aims of the governments education reform as:
- To raise standards at all levels of ability
- To increase parental choice of schools and to improve the partnership between the school and the parents.
- To make higher and further education more accessible, and more responsive to the needs of the economy.
- And lastly to achieve the best possible return from the resources invested in the education service.
An important part of the New Right philosophy- and one which has exercised a strong influence on educational reforms- has been its hostility to state bureaucracies. New Right generally holds the thinking of state-run institutes inefficient.
Although the New Right and the Conservative government of the 1980s and 1990s supported radical changes in the educational system , and sought to introduce a more business orientated curriculum, but in other areas they supported the teaching of very traditional subject. According to Stephen ball (1990) the proposed the teaching of subjects such as Greek, and Latin. They opposed social subjects such as science, peace studies, and personal, social and health education. They were also hostile against multi cultural education.
