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Schools

These are a major feature of New Labour's education strategy and the eventual aim seems to be for all schools to have specialist status. What this means, as you might expect, is that a school specialises in a particular curriculum area (business, sport, I.T. or modern foreign languages for example) and they are given extra government funding to develop that specialism.

Specialist status is given when a school satisfies the government they have a record of excellence in their specialist subject (which sounds a bit like Mastermind) and can raise £50,000 which the government then adds-to depending on whether the money is to be spent on new buildings ("capital funding") or extra-funding per pupil.

The basic idea behind this type of development is to encourage schools to develop "centres of subject excellence" in their particular area and, by so doing, generally drive-up educational standards.