Introduction

The Executive's Education Department has among its aims promoting social justice for children and young people; raising educational standards; modernising schools and enhancing professional responsibilities and rewards; guaranteeing early learning and quality care for all children; and, overall, ensuring that “every child or young person is able to develop to their fullest potential”. It seeks to achieve these through its Children and Young People's Group, whose remit includes children's rights and pre-school education; its Social Work Services Inspectorate, among whose responsibilities are “social work issues affecting children and young people” and liaison on such matters with other departments; and the Schools Group, responsible for a range of issues, including the National Priorities in education and, once again, social justice.

This wide-ranging brief says much about Executive attitudes, not least the overarching concerns for social justice and joined-up government. Education, moreover, deals with more than simply the young. Equally, policy aimed at children is more than simply to do with education. In this chapter, we discuss in this broad sense educational policy and aspects of child welfare. We begin with a variety of commentaries and analyses that set the scene and alert us to important themes. Next we move on to a short historical account of Scottish education, following this with discussions of New Labour and education and of the Executive's policies. Finally, we examine child welfare both as an important policy area in its own right and as a means of reinforcing points about human capital and the attempt to pursue an holistic welfare policy.

For Giddens (2000, p 165), investment in human capital, and the necessary reaction of governments to the “knowledge economy”, require “placing a premium on education”. This need might be seen as especially important in Scotland, with its low birth rate and declining population. Famously, New Labour campaigned in 1997 on a platform of ‘Education, education, education’; as Muschamp et al (1999) point out, a very different set of priorities from the 1979 Labour manifesto. In the intervening period there had been the plethora of changes brought in by the Conservatives. Writing in 1999, Muschamp et al (pp 101-2) claimed that there were strong elements of continuity between New Labour and Conservative education policy, for example in Labour's abandonment of “the principle of comprehensive education”.