Education under attack

NEW LABOUR’S Education White Paper is getting its second reading in
Parliament. It is a clear sign of the government’s intent to privatise
and fragment education.

Moreover, as these reports show, many local education authorities and
the private sector are already trying other measures to take apart a
comprehensive education system that had been an historic gain for
working-class people. Education has been undermined and underfunded for
many years. Parents and teachers must unite to defeat all these plans to
dismantle comprehensive education.

Birmingham: No to academies

WE ARE printing below an article by National Union of Teachers (NUT)
members in Birmingham, responding to Birmingham City Council’s proposal
that seven academies or ‘schools with academy-like features’ should
replace seven existing secondary schools.

THE ACADEMIES will be run by private sponsors who put up £2 million
for which they get control of the school and its assets. They will still
get public money to build and run the school. The sponsors will not be
accountable to the community in the area or parents at the school. The
role of democratically-elected representatives will be diminished.

Academies are based on the unproven notion that closing a school and
re-opening it as an Academy will improve education – there is no
evidence of this.

In 2004, of the eleven existing academies, six had improved GCSE
results, five had not and one failed an Ofsted inspection. Newly
published league tables show that half the 14 academies with GCSE pupils
last summer were in the bottom 200 of England’s 3,100 state registered
schools.

Private sponsors wanting to run academies don’t have to have
experience in education. Teachers in Academies didn’t even have to be
registered with the General Teaching Council until the government was
forced to alter the regulations in 2005. This shows the separate way the
government sees academies running.

Teachers lose out. When a school becomes an academy, the salaries and
conditions of service of employees already working there are protected
under the ‘Transfer of Undertakings’ proceedings (TUPE) but this lasts
for a limited period only. New employees can be hired under different
conditions of service and salary level.

Once a school becomes an academy elected members of the governing
body lose all control and private sponsors are allowed to appoint most
governors. No laws control the composition of governing bodies for
Academies.

The sponsors appoint the governors. The Times Educational
Supplement’s investigation of academies’ accounts highlighted the
influence that sponsors may have over governing bodies and over schools’
spending of their funding. Many areas once overseen by governing bodies,
such as funding, are now carried out centrally by sponsors to whom funds
are diverted.

Working-class pupils lose out too. Academies can select up to 10% of
their intake of pupils. They set their own priorities for selection and
could refuse places to the children in the school catchment area. In
some cases there may be other ‘back-door’ means of selection. Young
people from the area could be rejected and forced to look for schools
out of the area.

Public investment in "independent" academies is not using money for
the good of the community. Each place at an academy costs an estimated
£21,000 compared to £14,000 at a comprehensive. It makes no sense to use
public money to set up independent schools in Birmingham, when the local
authority has already drawn up and costed plans for rebuilding our
schools.

The NUT opposes academies because they are privatisation by the back
door, where public funds are given to private hands with no public
accountability. They allow selection and a two-tier system of education
and are the thin end of a wedge to undermine national conditions of
service agreements.


No to selection by religion

RECENTLY FIVE head teachers from Kent wrote to The Independent to
suggest the Labour government should include abolishing this county’s
grammar schools in its education ‘reforms’.

Julian Wilson, Tonbridge

Socialists should agree with this, but most of the five schools
concerned were themselves selective, not on the principle of the
’11-plus’ exam, but on the Old Testament view that the ‘sins of the
fathers should be visited unto the sons’.

Only those from families of the ‘correct’ religion, with a note from
their priest or vicar saying they’re frequent church attenders, are
admitted!

In Tunbridge Wells, the vast majority of students at the two Catholic
‘non-selective’ secondary schools (their heads among the five that
signed the letter) gain at least five GCSEs, in contrast to a
comprehensive in the same town where about a quarter achieve the same.

Gaining employment, let alone access to further and higher education,
is therefore far harder for those from non-religious backgrounds.

New Labour looks set to increase the number of schools where
selection on the basis of religion is used to determine applications.

Most City Academies are backed by religious groups (some more crudely
than others, such as Vardy’s Creationist academies).

The school of Blair’s own offspring, the London Oratory School, has
been given specific and unique permission for this system of choosing
pupils by the Minister for Education, Ruth Kelly, a member of the
Catholic Opus Dei.


Manchester: A pecking order for schools

AN ANNOUNCEMENT by a Manchester school reveals a new threat to the
education of working-class children. Taking advantage of government
plans to increase the number of ‘academies’, Hulme Grammar School in
Manchester have announced plans to become a state-funded academy by
September 2007.

Robin Pye

Parents currently paying £7,000 a year to send their children there
will no longer have to pay fees. The school will expand its pupil
numbers until it is double its present size.

So, more children will enjoy the 16-acre grounds and the outdoor
education centre in Yorkshire. But which children? If Hulme Grammar
School’s wonderful facilities and small class sizes were to be absorbed
into an education service aiming to meet the needs of all children in
south Manchester, then it would be hard to object to the plans.

But Hulme Grammar will enter a marketplace with a clear packing order
for schools. It is likely that their private grammar school past will
ensure they have first pick of the available pupils, based on paper
predictions of how easy it will be for the school to get them good
examination results.

Other south Manchester schools will privately be aghast at the
potential impact on their ability to cream off the easier-to-teach
pupils. And teachers in schools that currently end up teaching those
pupils that can’t get into other schools or who have recently moved to
the area, will be thinking ‘Same old, same old.’

This development presents working-class parents with the remote
possibility of getting their children into a good school coupled with
the likelihood of having to send them to a school which teaches an
unfair proportion of difficult-to-teach children. It is a game where
poorer families are given an educational raffle ticket while richer
parents can continue to buy the guarantee of a good education.

The school system delivering Europe’s best education is that in
Finland, based on comprehensive schools and small class sizes. Only
Blair’s ideological commitment to capitalism prevents him from imitating
the Finnish model.

Instead of putting in the investment into small class sizes that
would truly lift standards for all school children, he remains committed
to increasing the inequality in Britain’s school system in order to open
up opportunities for the private sector.

This commitment will lead to an increase in school closures.
Socialists can expect to get involved in more local campaigns to keep
community schools open in the near future.