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Patrick Ainley and Martin Allen
© Patrick Ainley and Martin Allen 2007
What has happened in schools, colleges and universities can be contested only by comprehending the system as a whole, which has become a main means of social control, now to be extended by raising the school leaving age to 18. Instead of emancipating the minds of future generations, it forecloses their possibilities. In this sense, Education Make You Fick, Innit1?
Despite more money being spent on it, education has been persistently privatised. Instead of a single 'Big Bang', privatisation has developed in different ways at different speeds, with New Labour operating simultaneously on many fronts, each of which feeds from and strengthens the others. This article looks briefly at how this has affected schools, colleges and universities and then suggests what can be done about it.
In schools, services like meals, childcare and teacher supply have been tendered to private profit, stimulated by sponsorship, commercialization and the privately controlled Local Educational Partnerships. The 2006 Education Act also encourages schools to become 'Trusts', as does the Building Schools for the Future Private Finance Initiative, creating publicly funded private schools, outside the Local Authority, like City Academies but with less money.
Unable to convince his supporters that Local Authorities should be abolished, Blair set about dismantling them. Rather than provide, they now merely commission education and other services, brokering 'customers' with private 'partners'. Alongside these activities, the provision of core services - in some cases the privatisation of the entire LA - has created rich pickings for corporate capital.
With recommendations in the 2005 Foster Report, 2006 Leitch Review and the latest FE Bill for 'contestability', with private providers and student 'vouchers', Further Education colleges similarly compete in a sea of private provision. They also have to compete with schools and universities that threaten to swallow them up, by off-loading vocational diploma-bound 14-19 year olds onto them, and franchising out foundation 'degrees'.
In Higher Education, the situation is potentially worse, and awareness of it typically least. Hence the ease with which free public service higher education was ended in 1997 so that student fees, raised again in 2006, are seen by many academics as a way of preserving their research careers and 'HE for its own sake', as they think of it. Yet the hierarchy of universities independently competing for fee-paying students offers a model that New Labour seeks to impose on the market in specialist schools and colleges. The HE market must be ended along with fees - replaced not by a graduate tax but by a return to progressive taxation. With the National Union of Students, we cannot give up on this demand.
Just like competition between incorporated colleges since 1993, market managed consolidation has already begun closing 'uncompetitive' university departments. The same process could face schools under the 2006 Education and Inspections Act.
Joined up resistance
To resist effectively, instead of universities blaming schools and both
forgetting about colleges, a debate about the distribution of educational
resources must consider the current inequalities between sectors, where
it is simply assumed that the older students are - unless they are adult
education students of course! - the more money should be spent on them.
There also remain unacceptable differences in resource between public and private schools, but proposals to abolish the latter have been forgotten. Gordon Brown has promised to spend as much on state as private schools, but what is the good if this is used to fund academies and other state-subsidised privatisation - including the record £2.2 billion The Guardian reported (2/9/06) consultants as milking from government contracts annually?
Meanwhile, Education Minister Alan Johnson has suggested private school teachers help out in the public sector as a condition of continued charitable status. Instead, we must insist charitable status end unconditionally.
We can take heart from campaigns against Academies, now linked in the Anti-Academies Alliance - which the National Union of Teachers has just joined. This is the government's weakest link as it has failed to attract sponsorship from big multinationals for the first City Academies and is saddled with a ragbag of buccaneer capitalists, together with bogus charities and religious foundations (including the Church of England which receives mega-bucks to fill its pews in the future!). Only the Tories support this wasteful programme, seeing it as to recreating the grammar schools they have renounced.
The campaign against the 2006 Education Bill (also only passed with Tory support) is another example of what is possible. Opponents of making all schools into trusts, independent of LAs, to compete with each other like FE colleges, although unable to stop the Bill from becoming law, created a coalition that will now fight battles for fair access.
However, concentrating exclusively on access at the expense of wider concerns sustains the illusion that everything else about education is fine and can be left to the experts. It implies agreement with New Labour's standards agenda and that the only disagreement is over the means to achieve this.
Reducing school, FE and HE teachers to technically delivering centrally inscribed standards has undermined 'professionalism' and sapped confidence to resist further change. This applies not only to teachers but also to social workers and others: even medical education is going the same way.
The acceptance of a 'sell-out' solution to their pay claim by UCU members in 2006 may be indicative of how many have been ground down by over ten years of being required to 'teach to the module', like 'teaching to the tests' in schools. Yet surveys show teachers in HE, FE and schools remain dedicated to their vocation and committed to helping their students.
The fact that more young people are experiencing the contradictions of full-time education to later ages and stages than ever before also provides an opportunity for change. However, this means a new collective culture has to be rebuilt. It means restoring teachers' confidence in their ability to become critical educational professionals prepared to assume a more transformative role, being part of wider discussions about the future and purpose of education.
This article and our book is a contribution to this debate.
This article is an edited version of an article that appeared in Red Pepper, based on Patrick Ainley's contribution to UCU congress FE fringe debate Bournemouth 30 May 2007.
1. Martin Allen and Patrick Ainley, Education Make You Fick, Innit? What's gone wrong in England's schools, colleges and universities and how to start putting it right, Tufnell Press 2007 - and available from Amazon and all good bookshops.
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