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Abstract
This paper first examines the New Labour government's redefinition of equality of opportunity in Britain, mainly with regard to education and the ways in which it mediates ‘opportunity’. In doing so, it also draws on wider social policy issues, such as the use of education policies to combat social exclusion. Second, the paper reviews European Union policies and selected documents that address questions of social inclusion, social cohesion and the role of education in achieving those policy goals. The main argument is that both New Labour policies in Britain and the examined EU documents promote rather minimal understandings of the term ‘equality of opportunity’, while, education, in both cases, is given an enormous burden to carry in balancing increasingly liberalised market‐driven economies, with the requirements of a socially just society.
Notes
* Department of Education, Keele University, Keele, Staffs ST5 5BG, UK. Email: [email protected]
In this article the ‘blanket’ term ‘British’ is used to describe the New Labour policies in relation to education and social exclusion. We need to acknowledge however, the great differences that exist amongst the different countries of the UK. In particular, the ‘modernising agenda’ of New Labour has played out very differently in Scotland and England (Alexiadou & Ozga, Citation2002) and, similarly, the discourses of social exclusion have been interpreted differently by the political elites of the two countries (Ozga, Citation1999). ‘British’ is here used as a term of convenience, since due to restrictions of space it was not possible to take these differences into account.
Under Tony Blair, Britain gave up the ‘opt out’ from the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty. As part of the conditions for opting in an Employment and a Social Chapter the British PM wished to see a stronger emphasis on labour flexibility and reduced labour market regulation (Kleinman, Citation2002).
The discourse of globalisation as an external economic constraint has been often used in political rhetoric in Britain, in the same way that the process of European integration is invoked (often alongside ‘globalisation’) across other European contexts as the ‘proximate cause of often painful social and economic reforms’ (Hay & Rosamond, Citation2002, p. 157).
As Gray (Citation2000, p. 27) has argued, the distinction between ‘equality of opportunity’ and ‘equality of outcome’ is vague itself since it does not specify ‘which opportunities’ and ‘which outcomes’ are to be equalised. Detailed discussion of these concepts and their distinctions can be found in Marshall et al. (Citation1997) and in texts that discuss social justice (Gray, Citation1989, for a neo‐liberal perspective; Goldthorpe, Citation1996, for a stratification perspective; Sen, Citation1992 and Young, Citation1990, for a radical analysis; Rawls, Citation1971, for a classical liberal approach; Hayek, Citation1974 and Nozick, Citation1974, for libertarian and conservative approaches respectively).
In 2001, following the Lisbon meeting of the European Council, the Commission published the European report on the quality of school education—sixteen quality indicators, that offer a system of ‘benchmarking’ ‘as means of evaluating and improving the quality of schooling’ (Dale, Citation2003, p. 6). For a discussion of European education governance and the OMC, see Alexiadou (Citation2005), Alexiadou and Lange (Citation2003), Dale (Citation2002, Citation2003, Citation2005).
‘Within EU law, the principle of “equal treatment” finds no coherent protection. It finds expression in the requirement of equal pay for equal work in Article 141 and the Equal Treatment Directive, both of which concern equality of the sexes. It also applies as a general prohibition on discrimination on grounds of nationality running as a thread through EC law. The principle of equality has not been applied as a free‐standing principle at all in other contexts, such as race, religion, or sexual orientation, although, following the introduction of Article 13 EC, it now can be, and has been, used as a basis for introducing such legislation’ (Douglas‐Scott, Citation2002, p. 504).
White Papers represent the Commission's ‘policy initiatives’. They are documents containing proposals for Community action in a specific area. White Papers contain an official set of proposals in specific policy areas and are used as vehicles for their development. They are not legislation.
Improving employability is one of the four pillars of the employment guidelines which were addressed to member states. During the funding period 2000–2006, the European Social Fund is helping to develop and promote active labour market policies with a view to combating and preventing unemployment. But, the strategy decided by the European Council in Lisbon explicitly stated that it should ‘enable the Union to regain the conditions for full employment’. The goal of full employment is reiterated in the employment guidelines for 2001, in which the Commission suggested concrete measures on how to achieve this aim.
The European Union has chosen a ‘relative’ measurement of poverty given by defining an income threshold below which people are at risk of falling into poverty. In this report this threshold is defined as the proportion of individuals living in households where income is below 60% of the national equivalised median income. In 1997, 18% of the EU population was living in households with income below this threshold (p. 19).
Frank Vandenboucke, former leader of the Flemish Socialist Party and a key figure in the modernisation of European social policy, makes powerful arguments for a participation society grounded in Rawlsian philosophy (in Jenson & Pochet, Citation2002, p. 15).