THE promise of a good schooling for every child in Britain is delivered in the government's White Paper, Excellence in Schools.

With its watchwords of "zero tolerance for failure," it honours Labour's election pledge to make education its top priority.

In that sense, it is not just pupils, teachers, schools, heads and education authorities that are to be judged by the reforms' new yardsticks; the Blair regime has set itself a crucial test with the electorate.

But this is not before time because, continually over at least a generation, Britain's education system, once arguably the best in the world, has been shown to have been overtaken by many other countries.

In many ways, this White Paper is not concerned with past years' debates about what to do.

It has simply picked up and built on many of the best ideas that the Tories came up with for reversing falling standards.

And Labour has the added advantage that most of the sparring with the teaching profession over those reforms is water under the bridge. So we see that the tests that the Conservatives introduced are retained, increased and strengthened with tough targets.

The schools' league tables are kept, but will become "value added" to give a less-crude picture of schools' performances.

Mixed-ability teaching, which John Major's government had begun to erode with increased selection by schools, is to continue to whither as children of similar ability are taught together and quick-learners "fast-tracked" to stretch their abilities.

Add to these the extra measures of the home-school contracts which all parents will have to sign to make sure their children attend and behave, the toughening up of teacher training, the stress on basics and new tests for head teachers and it is plain that this old-and-new package aims at top-to-bottom improvement from infant classes to the final year.

Labour will need the teachers on board and seems, so far, to have got the unions' approval.

But what is being said is that the debate on education is over and here is the action plan to be got on with.

The Labour government will be judged on its success.

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