Tony Blair famously won power on a pledge that New Labour's priorities in government would be 'education, education, education'. It was an agenda that appealed to the swing voters in middle England and an acknowledgement that in the age of knowledge economies the schools agenda had to take centre stage.
But what legacy will he leave to his successor, Gordon Brown, when he hands over the keys to 10 Downing Street on Wednesday?
'Overall, Blair has achieved a great deal,' said Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers. 'When he came into power we were haemorrhaging teachers from the profession. Now there are 40,000 more teachers and their salaries have gone up by 45 per cent.'
Mr Blair's early mantra was that the government would focus on 'standards not structures' in education. At school, children face standard tests at seven, 11 and 14, in addition to GCSEs at 16. Labour added baseline assessments for four-years-olds and created value-added league tables to publicise schools' impact on pupils' performance and brought in measures to tackle 'failing schools'.
The result was a ratcheting up of the pressure on schools. In addition, a new emphasis was put on giving pupils the basic skills of reading and maths, with compulsory literacy and numeracy hours in primary schools.
The improvements in the test results of 11-year-olds suggest the strategy has worked, but key targets Labour set itself were missed. In 1997, 63 per cent of pupils reached expected levels in English, 62 per cent in maths and 69 per cent in science. By 2006 this had jumped to 79 per cent in English, 76 per cent in maths and 87 per cent in science.