Education after New Labour’s Education Bill


THE GOVERNMENT has got its highly contentious Education Bill passed
through Parliament, with the full support of the Tory ‘opposition’.
New Labour’s legislation aims to destroy the comprehensive education
system, through encouraging so-called Trust schools based on Blair’s
failed ‘city academy’ scheme, and other measures which will increase
inequalities in secondary education.
This feature looks at education after Labour’s latest attacks. It
includes an article by Socialist Party member and National Union of
Teachers (NUT) activist Martin Powell-Davies on a major feature of this
new bill, the encouragement of ‘faith schools’.
In the other part of the feature, sixth-form student Ashley Hassell,
who has played an active role in a campaign against cuts in his
sixth-form college in Southampton, writes on his view of education in
schools, colleges and universities in an article that he wrote for an
unofficial college magazine.

If you have any comments on these articles, or reports of struggles
against New Labour’s Tory education policy,
click here to contact us or email us at [email protected]


Blair puts his faith in religious schools

MANY PARENTS and many teachers are worried at the growing influence
of religious views on both education and politics. When a Prime
Minister, happy to let God judge his support for war in Iraq, is also
happy to let fundamentalist car dealers like Sir Peter Vardy run his
Academies according to "Biblical teaching", there is plenty to be
worried about.

Martin Powell-Davies (secretary, Lewisham, National Union of Teachers)

If you are a parent in Middlesbrough and your local school is a Vardy
Academy you already have little choice but to see your child suffer
religious indoctrination. But Blair’s Education Bill will give even
greater opportunities to business and religious sponsors to instil their
ideas on young people.

The Bill will encourage foundation schools and trusts to set separate
admission criteria which allow selection, perhaps overtly on the grounds
of faith or "aptitude" but also, even if covertly, on academic and
social grounds as well. As socialists, we say all schools should belong
to a democratically elected local authority, operating the same
comprehensive admissions arrangements.

In campaigning against the Education Bill, the question of the
separate admissions arrangements that already operate in existing faith
schools is inevitably being raised by parents. A recent survey of Church
primary schools in England confirmed that they were less likely to
accept children from low-income families than council-run schools.

In some rural areas and small towns, Church schools are already the
only option. Falling rolls are adding to the problem with existing
community schools being bullied into merging with church schools – but
under voluntary-aided status.

In areas like Kent, where the 11-plus continues, the situation is
even worse. Schools are polarised between the selective grammar schools,
the "comprehensive" faith schools that may require appropriate proof of
attendance at Church for children to be admitted, and the remaining
"sink schools".

So, in opposing privatisation and selection, teachers and trade
unionists also have to tackle the broader question of whether faith
schools should have any place in our school system at all.

Secular education

A HUNDRED years ago, the demand for secular education was strongly
held in the growing trade union movement. There was deep resentment at
the 1902 Education Act which legislated for "voluntary" schools to be
left in the control of the Church but paid for by the public purse.

As the Labour Clarion of the time complained, "it is preposterous
that ratepayers should be compelled to pay an unwilling toll for the
promulgation of a theology which they deny".

A century on, socialists would still call it preposterous! However,
after so many years during which government-funded voluntary-aided
schools have become a firmly established fact, a blunt call to end state
funding for faith schools today could provoke a fierce reaction. It
could easily be misunderstood as a more general attack on the provision
of schools.

Socialists and activists in the teachers’ unions aim to win the
argument in local communities, including faith communities, against
Church schools having a separate status to community schools. Our policy
should be to encourage all faith schools to become fully integrated in
the state sector.

That doesn’t mean that socialists and trade unionists shouldn’t
carefully explain why they support secular education, while also
defending the right of every individual to practise their religion. This
should include supporting the granting of special leave for religious
festivals, not just Christian ones. It also means defending the right of
Muslim girls to choose – or to choose not – to wear the hijab.

However, we must oppose religious views being used as an excuse to
prevent young people from gaining access to a thorough health and sex
education or to allow discriminatory, homophobic or scientifically false
ideas such as "intelligent design" to find their way into the
curriculum.

We argue for policies that should apply universally – for inclusive,
well-resourced, non-discriminatory, genuinely comprehensive schools
teaching a range of religious and non-religious views as part of a wider
humanities curriculum that encourages solidarity across the globe.

Socialists stress the need to campaign against the imposition of
business and religious sponsors and help encourage existing faith
schools to become fully integrated within local authorities as community
schools.

We need to avoid our views on faith schools creating an unnecessary
barrier to building united opposition to new government attacks. But we
must argue against the existing divisions that have been created by
faith schools as well.

Community schools

OF COURSE, when we are putting forward our views on faith schools,
socialists and trade unionists have to be extremely careful not to be
seen to be part and parcel of a racist society that denies rights to one
minority while allowing the established faith groups to maintain their
privileges.

Such discrimination is particularly sharply felt within some Muslim
communities, with their anger fuelled by the Iraq war, poverty and
growing Islamophobia since 9/11. In areas of London, for example,
Christian Church schools’ faith requirements operate at the expense of
Muslim children’s access to local schools.

At this stage, most Muslims in Britain support multiracial,
multi-faith schools, understanding that further separatism would only
lead to increased discrimination against the Muslim community. But some
calls have been made for the setting-up of more state funded Islamic
faith schools. However, socialists have to explain that this would be a
retrograde step, both for workers as a whole and the Muslim community in
particular.

Increasing the numbers of faith schools would only increase
segregation and division in working-class communities. In contrast,
multi-faith, comprehensive education, while insufficient on its own to
overcome all the problems of society as a whole, enables youth to accept
and recognise differences of faith and race, fostering a unity that can
be built on in the wider community beyond the school gates.

This is particularly important at a time when, in the absence of a
clear socialist alternative, poverty, wars and oppression have created
the conditions for the growth of more fundamentalist interpretations of
Christianity, Islam and other faiths. Unchallenged, these ideas could
contribute to increasing religious and ethnic tensions that can
dangerously divide workers and youth.

Rather than increase the numbers of faith schools, we stand for
separate schools of any faith to become reintegrated as non-selective
local community schools.


From nursery to university…

Why we need free, democratic comprehensive education

"EDUCATION, EDUCATION, Education" is the much-repeated quote of a
more youthful Tony Blair promising that things could only get better.
Nine years later, having doused the flames that represented our hopes of
a better future, what has become of education? Is the education sector
run for the benefit of all or for a select few? Is there the
accountability needed? Have standards improved?

Ashley Hassell

I feel that the best education should be available to everyone no
matter what a person’s circumstances are. That is why it pains me to see
the government claiming the same while eroding the comprehensive system.

Selection continues behind the scenes through guises such as
religious commitment, generally easier for middle-class parents to
attain. This leads to a two-tier education system as has been seen in
Tunbridge Wells in Kent.

There, the majority of students at the town’s two Catholic secondary
schools gain at least five GCSEs compared to less than a quarter of
students at the town’s comprehensives. The selection involved in the
application process for religious schools is one of the many reasons for
getting rid of them.

The funding for further education seems very unfair as there are
massive inequalities according to location. Funding per student was
frozen at a level influenced by the amount of courses that students took
in FE colleges. This means that each student in Southampton receives
around £1,000 less than those in Winchester, where students generally
have a great deal more money to pay their own way.

Student debt

This is evidence that education is not run for the benefit of all.
Nor are the poorer given the most help, as the government claims. In my
opinion, the government is trying to produce an education system where
the middle classes stand a much better chance of reaching the higher
echelons of the job market while the working class are churned out for
low-paid casual labour.

This government has been implementing policies which treat
universities as no different to businesses with shareholders and
full-scale private investment. The outcome of this is a lower quality of
services and a rise in the price of university education.

One-third of all students live on less than £40 a week while by 2010,
with the introduction of tuition fees, student debt could be as high as
£38,000! This is pricing the working class out of a university
education.

Besides, this money isn’t going to university staff, more often than
not it is going into needless developments and the wages of
‘world-class’ researchers as is the case in Brunel University.

The UCEA (the university employers’ association who represent the
vice-chancellors) made a deal that one-third of top-up fees would go to
increase the abysmal wages of teaching staff. However they have reneged
on this deal.

Meanwhile, the vice-chancellors are happy to pay themselves a
pittance also; the Vice-Chancellor of Southampton University pays
himself a measly £200,000 a year after all! University staff should be
paid a fair wage, not least because it encourages them to provide a
better service.

Accountabilty

OVERALL, THERE is a lack of true accountability in much of education
today. The universities are continuing to privatise and invest in
‘unethical’ companies such as BAE Systems (seller of arms to Pinochet,
Mugabe etc.) while trust schools will obliterate accountability in
secondary education.

The trust school’s sponsor can appoint the majority of the governing
body who at the moment are elected and Local Education Authorities
(LEAs) are no longer going to provide education itself but services
which schools can buy. Also, the unelected company employs teachers and
controls their conditions of pay.

As more and more council services are privatised and outsourced, real
power over our services is leaving local democratic control and being
handed to unaccountable business.

There seems no sense in the government’s plans or in the deregulation
of education. There is no evidence that closing a school and reopening
it under a trust will improve education. In 2004, of the eleven existing
academies, six had improved GCSE results, five had not and one failed an
OFSTED inspection.

In the newly-published league tables, half the 14 academies with GCSE
pupils were in the bottom 200 of England’s 3,100 state registered
schools. Furthermore, public investment in "independent" schools is not
using money for the good of the community. Each place at an academy
costs an estimated £21,000 as opposed to £14,000 at a comprehensive.

Trust Schools do not increase choice for parents or children; they do
quite the opposite. Academies are free to pick out the middle class,
better-performing children to achieve higher places in the league tables
while sinking schools continue to fail.

The Education and Inspections Bill is an unpopular bill pushed
through by an unpopular government. Only 5% of grass-roots Labour Party
members support the government view that all schools should be run by
external sponsors while just 20 of the 3,100 state registered schools
have said they would be willing to adopt trust school status.

I think the government should invest in a free, democratic,
comprehensive education from the cradle to the grave. This is
controversial, at least in the era of Blairite marketisation but there
are the resources in society to fund such a programme alongside other
necessities such as a pension linked to earnings.

For instance, as shown a recent article in the guardian (g2, 17
April) there is no shortage of money in the UK. Since 2000, Britain’s
liquid assets (stuff people own that can easily be turned into cash
excluding first and second homes!) have increased by more than 50%, far
ahead of inflation, from £1 trillion (that’s £1,000 billion) to £1.6
trillion.

The poor need not be hurt by a progressive tax system: 30% of the
population (some 18 million people) own no liquid assets. Contrast this
with the richest group in Britain who represent 0.3% of the population
and own half the country’s liquid assets! They have seen their assets
increase by 79% in five years (far ahead of inflation) and have an
average £70 million each!

So let’s not believe the spin that there isn’t the money as the
figures certainly prove that there is. Education is vital and needs to
be invested in!

(This article is in no way an advertisement for the opposition
parties: the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are also calling
for deregulation and marketisation!)


What we stand for

  • Free, good quality education for all from nursery to university.
  • No to divisive City Academies or Trust schools! Fight for
    well-funded, genuinely comprehensive, neighbourhood schools. Keep big
    business out of our education.
  • No school closures, cutbacks or redundancies.
  • Build a mass campaign against the Education Bill, involving
    teachers and other education workers, school students, parents and the
    wider community.
  • No to the commercialisation and privatisation of education.
  • Scrap tuition fees – no to top-up fees and a graduate tax. For a
    living grant for all students.
  • Build the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party to challenge the big
    business parties that work together to tear apart comprehensive
    education.