School Standards and Framework Act 1998
Encyclopedia
The School Standards and Framework Act 1998 was the major education legislation passed by the incoming Labour
government of Tony Blair
.
This Act:
Labour Party (UK)
The Labour Party is a centre-left democratic socialist party in the United Kingdom. It surpassed the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929-1931. The party was in a wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after...
government of Tony Blair
Tony Blair
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007...
.
This Act:
- imposed a limit of 30 on infantInfant schoolAn Infant school is a term used primarily in the United Kingdom for school for children between the ages of four and seven years. It is usually a small school serving a particular locality....
class sizes. - abolished grant-maintained schoolGrant-maintained schoolGrant-maintained schools were state schools in England and Wales between 1988 and 1998 that had opted out of local government control, being funded directly by a grant from central government...
s, introducing foundationFoundation schoolIn England and Wales, a foundation school is a state-funded school in which the governing body has greater freedom in the running of the school than in community schools....
status. - provided for a schedule of fully selective state schools (grammar schoolGrammar schoolA grammar school is one of several different types of school in the history of education in the United Kingdom and some other English-speaking countries, originally a school teaching classical languages but more recently an academically-oriented secondary school.The original purpose of mediaeval...
s), and set up a procedure by which local communities could vote for their abolition. No grammar schools have yet been abolished using this mechanism. - prohibited the expansion of partial selectionPartially selective school (England)In England, a partially selective school is one of a few dozen state-funded secondary schools that select a proportion of their intake by ability or aptitude, permitted as a continuation of arrangements that existed prior to 1997....
. - introduced an Admissions Code and the office of Schools Adjudicator to enforce this Code and consider objections to admission arrangements.