HM Government

Excellence and equity: raising standards for all

As the Children’s Plan made clear, schools have an important role to play in ensuring that childhood is fun and rewarding and in shaping the citizens of the future, and at its core our education system is about standards for all equipping young people to get on in life and to fulfil their potential. School attainment at 16, the evidence shows, is a key indicator of future success. This is why improving the standard of teaching and learning, and as a result the qualifications that young people achieve, has been our core goal in education for the last 10 years.

Over the past decade we have doubled investment in real terms in every child’s school education, with total funding increasing by £2,880 per pupil (97%) in real terms between 1997/98 and 2008/09. We have secured big improvements in the quality of leadership and teaching and learning, and increased the amount of targeted help available to children who most need it, including those with special educational needs. We have remodelled and improved the professionalism of the school workforce, and also expanded it: there are now 35,000 more teachers and 115,000 more teaching assistants in our schools than in 1997.

School buildings have been modernised and rebuilt through the Building Schools for the Future programme, to which we have allocated over £9 billion to rebuild or renew every secondary school in England that needs it - the biggest single government investment in improving school buildings for over 50 years - and the Primary Capital programme. Sustained attention has been given to helping schools improve, and the academies programme has greatly improved opportunities by creating good new schools in areas where standards were too low.

The result has been that standards have significantly improved across the board over the past decade; 2008 saw record results in assessments and examinations with 107,000 more pupils leaving primary school with a good level of English and mathematics than in 1997, and 68,000 more gaining five or more good GCSEs, including both English and mathematics. The international Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study 2007 (TIMSS) found that English pupils ranked in the top five amongst participating countries at age 14 for science; performance in maths at age 14 had significantly improved since 2003, to seventh place; and that England was the most consistently high-achieving European country overall at ages 10 and 14 and in both subjects. We are now determined to build on this progress to raise standards for all.

Schools are at the heart of our Children’s Plan ambition: to make this the best place in the world to grow up. The Children’s Plan is designed to put children and families at the heart of everything we do as a government. As part of this, schools must be able to rely on the other services that support children and families: health services, youth services, housing and many others. This is why we are strengthening Children’s Trusts and giving schools a stronger voice within them. While this chapter focuses on schools, our approach to “Strengthening family life” and “Supporting communities to support individuals” are set out in later chapters.