Andy Burnham, the shadow education secretary, leads the education review. He will be examining what families want from schools, and asking how the UK can improve standards in English, maths and science.
He will also try to find out how much influence people want over their schools, and will ask how the UK should go about creating a "professional teaching force" and what children need to become "successful adults".
His advisers include the psychologist and TV personality Tanya Byron, Sir Tim Brighouse, a former schools commissioner for London, Rod Bristow, the president of educational publisher Pearson UK, and John Stannard, the director of the national literacy strategy from 1996 to 2001.
Tom Clark writes:
The terms of reference are bland here, but an acute dilemma underlies them – a dilemma about how to respond to the coalition's tremendous push towards turning ever more schools into supposedly independent academies, which Labour established in poor parts of the country.
Even before the new free school academies start to open, the educational map is being redrawn, and by the next election Labour will confront new facts on the ground, with the power of local authorities over schooling greatly diminished.
The international evidence is mixed, suggesting competition between independent schools can raise standards, but that it does not do so reliably and can have the side-effect of increasing social segregation.
Some experts say the imagined autonomy is a sham, as the secretary of state will be able, by wielding the chequebook, to exert much more power than his predecessors were able to, when local authorities had much more clout.
Can you think of reforms to academies that Labour ought to propose, or would it do better to forget arguments about school structures, and focus on standards in the classroom instead?
