EDUCATION HISTORY

Education History

Education History

Introduction

In the fast-changing 21st century, a prerequisite of rapid growth in economy and the ability to compete in the global environment for a nation is to have a successful and coherent policy and system for educating and training its existing and future workforce (Hodgson, 1993). Over the last decades, the United Kingdom higher education reform has never stopped its pace ahead of the national reform or been less intervention in the field of non-intervention principles. The important turning point of the former Prime Minister Tony Blair came into power. Blair's New Labour won the political power in 1997. From then on his government began a series of reform policy. Blair initiated lots of education reform policies. From the beginning, Blair's government has taken the drastic measures to promote higher education reform, promulgated and implemented a number of higher education reform policies, aiming to higher education development to fit in multi-demand and severe challenges. With the background of Blair's construction of the new welfare state, higher education reform has been far beyond its own meaning and value.

With an overall review of the relevant literatures in higher education polities, the essay will describe and analyze the context of Britain's higher education policy. With the literatures and the analysis of context, this essay will examine the factors influencing the higher educational policy and discuss factors of the initiatives and the impact they have or would have on the UK educational reform and educational achievement.

2. Reviews of Relevant Literatures2.1. An Overall Comment on Higher Education Policy

In Hawke's book 'Education Policy: International Comparison', he compared or formed a macro perspective of UK higher education policy to make the evaluation. Gordon, who co-author of the “20th century England, education and policy ", the editor of 'International Comparative Study of Higher Education Policy change and policy-making process', etc. also suggested a macro-scope of English higher education policy. In addition, there were a number of renowned scholars, through books, lectures or debates to express their views on higher education policy. If the 20th century had a profound impact on the 60's the development of higher education, that would be Robbins' two books “the modern world of universities and other papers on higher education " and “Higher Rethinking Education”. It was Robbins, arising after the enactment of a series of discussions carried out to justify Higher education expansion policy, further explained that many of the views expressed dissatisfaction with the government later practice. In fact, the Labour Party was in power, Robbins reported that many of their views were not adopted by the government, but to a disagreement with the proposed direction. After a book published in 1980, some researches (Bash, 1989; Chitty, 1989) argued about the system of university education and expressed the views of all aspects of content to the University in 60-80 during the development of the historical facts as the basis. With the 60's student movement and the times unrest, the university's scale, financing and loans, expansion mode, the relationship between countries and ...