The 1997 Education White Paper - a failure of standards

February 1997 saw the publication of an influential report (Literacy Task Force, 1997a) on literacy, written by a ‘task force' set up by the Labour Party and chaired by Professor Michael Barber. Following Labour's victory in the May 1997 election, many of the ideas from that report were incorporated into the education White Paper, ‘Excellence in Schools', which was published in July. In this article, we take a critical look at the assumptions which underpin the literacy task force report, and which in turn provide support for some of the policies proposed in the White Paper. We do so from the perspective that good educational research can, and should, inform and influence policy, and with the hope that it might do so more in the near future than it has in the recent past.